Post by theravenmattknox on Mar 23, 2021 5:46:49 GMT -5
It was a white hot flash. And then nothing.
He’d been knocked unconscious before. More times than he can count which decidedly was not a good thing, especially when it came to the outlook of his later life. This time though it felt different. For one thing, and the most disconcerting part? He could hear the world around him this time, even after the switch had been flipped and everything between his ears went into a forced ‘rest mode’.
He felt himself pushed to get up, his body and muscles acting independent of the freshly severed mind that usually oversaw them. He heard the grunt of effort by the Supreme Machine, and felt a second warmth wash over him to pair with the blood flowing down his face. This was it. The end and oblivion finally come to collect. In an instant, the fight and the will to survive slipped through his fingers and he awaited the end eagerly..
But of course, once he wanted it it was torn away from him..
He heard JC charge in, heard the blows landing between the two big men sounding more like two bull bison fighting for mating rights than two men trading fists. He heard Amber Ryan’s voice, felt her hands move the hair from his face to expose the gash that bled freely, staining my skin and the floor with the color of my lifeblood.
He heard Ivy call out to him, Hope comforting her. Shouting, accusation, questioning. It all turned into a roar of white noise eternally lost to the ether as the pitch black he floated in slowly filled with a white hot light, cutting through like the Sun does every morning to the night. Only this light? It was devoid of life. Of warmth.
He felt a familiar chill crawl up the back of his neck….wait, he had a neck here?
“Hello, Ma t the w”
And like that, the endless void of white hot, arctic cold light was gone and he stood in an all too familiar bedroom, in an all too familiar house. There, seated upon his bed was an all too familiar devil.
And in that void, now a delusion and a graveyard he found his voice...
“Hello, Charlotte..”
-----
He was stable. That’s all they could do. That’s all they would tell her.
Hope sat in the sparse waiting area of the hospital. She hadn’t caught its name, hadn’t tried to. She picked at a loose thread on her sweater, mind simultaneously vibrating with every worst case scenario weighed down with a self inflicted guilt.
“Get Ivy to my dressing room.” He had made one request of her. And instead, she let Ivy convince her to go to catering. Get a snack before they were to be locked down in a room for the duration of the show with their father hovering nearby for all of it, the pang of Amber Ryan getting attacked no doubt weighing heavy on his mind. She let a sad smile play upon her face a moment. For a man so widely despised in some circles, her father was no doubt the most empathetic man she’d ever met.
Failures took root beneath his skin and in his heart like old redwood, and existed just as eternally. The entire ride from Vegas to Reno was quiet, save for Ivy’s phone and the music in her earbuds. Her father’s face was as still and quiet as his eyes screamed in a pent up rage and sadness.
And now, as it ended so many times, they were in a Hospital. This was the first time she had the ‘privilege’ of being present for the incident that put him here, and what's more she got to carry the yoke of guilt and shame for having caused it.
Not a drop of blood between them..
‘Because it's too busy staining the floor’ she thought to herself, eyes wandering up to the clock on the wall once more.
------
“I know i’m not fucking dead.” He rasped to the figure seated on the California King canopy bed. Her dark hair cascaded down past a slender pair of shoulders, to the small of her back. Her skin pale and cool as it was in both life and death. Her eyes, a pair of burning emeralds bore into his own.
Charlotte Knight, or as the world came to despise her..Charlie James.
“Do you?” her voice carrying the weight of a thick Scottish accent while still being light as a feather, “Just like you’re sure I am?” A wry smile, mocking.
“You are dead.” He bit back, eyes darting to the window and stomach falling to his knees. Charlotte catches the movement, but doesn’t follow. She knows. How could she not?
“So focused on that night. Even after a decade of my presence and you still think you lost something when I gave up the ghost..” a snort, “The living are so close minded.”
He didn’t respond, instead taking a moment to really absorb his surroundings. The room wasn’t how he had left it late last year. No, it was cleaner. Missing the layers of dust gifted to it by the decade and a half of neglect and avoidance,No, his mind had taken him to a happier time for the room. Back when it was just a room, and not a graveyard.
“You’re here because you need to be, and you know it.” She shifted her stancem uncrossing her leg and leaning forward onto it. His eyes drifted briefly to her cleavage, as ample as he remembered. He shifted his gaze almost immediately, feeling a bite of shame. Pearl would kill him..
Oh fuck, Pearl does she..
“Your little girlfriend knows, yes. But she’s in Baltimore and getting any kind of flight at the drop of a hat is a bear nowadays, isn't it?” Charlotte’s face cracked with a sneer that dripped equal parts malice and saccharine. “No, afraid it’s just little Hope here. All alone, but what else is new? She’s always alone, especially since you convinced her to move to Baltimore and then ran away from the city like a scalded dog.”
“Shut up.”
“No.” Came her curt, cold reply. “No, Matthew i’ve been silent for too long, let you stray on your own for too long and look where it’s gotten you. Hanging by a thread and without even the phantom of an idea of how to fix anything..and so selfish, too.”
“This all could have been evaded, Matthew. If you had just not goated on the unstable creature, if you hadn’t taken his bait. One would think that maybe it was intentional? Maybe, you really are craving the end still, eh Matthew?”
He remained silent, eyes averting out the window, to the ghost of a full moon that filled the room with an ethereal moonlight as bright as an afternoon sun but devoid of anything resembling the life affirming warmth.
He took a few steps then, to the bed and took a seat next to Charlotte. Quietly, he noted feeling no warmth from the woman next to him, either.
“No. No you are quite more suited to the other -cide. Or so Marv Nixon goes on about endlessly while the flames lick at his face and three dollar comb over,” He stiffened then, the subject causing his blood to go as cold as the rest of the room “And that’s why i’m here, Matthew. Why we’re here.”
“We?”
And in an instant, as if he had been sitting there the entire time a third figure joined them, seated in the corner in the old high-back chair. To anyone who would look in, they’d swear Matthew had just been joined by an identical twin. But no, something was...off about this figure. He sat cross legged in the big chair, dressed in Matthew’s old ring gear from FWF. His face painted in corpse paint with a Glasgow smile penciled in across his lips and cheeks, eyes each crossed out with an “X’. eyes that held no emotion, and no color. As white as the pain on the rest of the face.
It’s black hair, though. That was the giveaway. Because upon closer inspection, the hair that ran from the top of the figures head and all the way down its back? It wasn’t hair at all.
It was plumage.
Matthew stayed silent, but shook his head, “No.”
“You’ve run out of choices, Matthew.”
Charlotte's voice remained even and void of emotion, and for the first time she reached out and touched his hand. Her touch was as frigid as the arctic and brought an uneasy, queasy feeling to his stomach that instantly made him dizzy. He shook his head, eyes shifting back to the figure from hers. It’s lips spread into a grin now, a stream of blood running from each corner of the smile. Dark, black blood akin to the kind bled out from a corpse that had been sitting for a long, long time.
Years, even.
“Son, i’m no fan of hers or its but you need to hear ‘er out.”
His eyes snapped to the source of the thick, hoarse cockney accent then. And seated now in a chair by the window, elbows resting on a desk was an elderly gentleman with the face of a seventy year old but the mischievous fire in his eyes of a man a quarter of his age. Platinum white-gold hair slicked back and a neat goatee adorned upon his face. He wore a gray suit as he had to every Sunday service coming up.
Hugh Thomas Alano, the man who raised him. Who trained him in the ring and out of it.
One of many he couldn’t save.
“You are on borrowed time, my son. And the way you’re burnin’ through it, won’t be long until this turns to more than jus’ a visit.”
“Dad…”
“No talking, Matty. Not now.” The man stood up, walking with the sort of purpose afforded only to the patriarch of a family, he moves to the window and yanks the blinds aside. The moonlight, and the Monterey night were replaced suddenly by the image of the hospital waiting room in Reno, Nevada. By the image of the lone blonde girl, staring down at her feet and practically emanating guilt for what had come to pass.
“She blames herself.” Charlotte cut in, snapping him from his reverie “And if we’re being honest, it is almost as much her fault as it yours, Matthew.” His gaze shot to Charlotte, then suddenly white hot and protective.
“Don’t you d--”
“I said almost as much her fault, Matthew,” She disarmed him suddenly, her hand coming to rest upon his cheek. He felt the air leave him instantly, found himself leaning into the touch. The touch he had craved almost every night since he had lost it, until he had come to meet Pearl..
Pearl..
He snapped his cheek away, raising another arm and slapping the offending arm away from him.
“You knew the sort of danger you were putting them in, and yet you kept on,” Charlotte said flatly, his eyes shifting back to look at Hope and the moment dragging on so close and yet so far away. A paternal pang bit down upon his heart, and all he wanted was to go and hold her. Tell her it was okay and not to blame herself.
“You knew you couldn’t protect them. That entire time, you sat in Vegas playing guardian when you knew he wasn’t coming. Hoping he would do something to provoke you further because you wanted it, Matthew. Oblivion and the end..”
“No..”
“Son.” Hugh’s voice snapped his attention to the older man as it always had in life, “Son, are you trying to convince us, or yourself?” He motioned with his hands, toward an imaginary mountain of evidence.
“Matthew..my boy, I love you. Loved you since me and the missus brought you in. Loved watching you grow and become what I always knew you could be, but it wasn’t always easy. Every fight you shouldn’t have picked, every risk you took. It was obvious, to me as it was to the nuns who brought you up until I took over. You live with guilt, son. Blaming yourself for selfish addicts, internalizing the viciousness of the Knox’s...and I know how hard it was after I left you, son..”
Feeling like he had no one..didn’t belong. Hating everything and himself. All of it true. He chuckled, shaking his head and standing from the bed. He paced the room silently, as Hugh began to speak again.
“You came so close, and so slowly. Every day watching you poison yourself and hope it was the last one...I loathed ye for it, boy. I loathed that you had quit. Given up on ye, on your girls, on the business I brought you up and into.”
“Then you shouldn’t have left. Neither of you should have.” He snapped back suddenly, his body suddenly vibrating with rage “Throw yourself out of a window and trying to fight armed men by yourself in a drunken stupor to defend this fucking monument to your earnings, to your own success and failures.”
“You two, so educated in my suffering and my pain but you left me to suffer it alone. You offered a reprieve, you both….you meant so much to me. Hugh, the only one I could go to when I didnt understand something..and you” He pointed at Charlotte “You miserable, wretched bitch I loved you. I loved you with the intensity of a million white hot suns. And because you’re crazy, because you can’t act right you ...you”
He lost the words then, shaking his head, before shifting his gaze to the third figure.
“And You. I left you behind, buried you with everything and everyone else after I finally got right. You were the thing that pushed me too far, made me do fucking heinous things to people and myself. Sacrificed years of my life just to feed into..whatever the fuck you are”
“You, Matthew.” came Charlotte’s voice once more “He’s you, who you really are. The Raven. That Raze, that Ruin? That’s him. And he’s the only way you’re going to protect yourself, and those girls now”
“You have spent this year in your return in silent suffering, fighting to prove a lie you have been telling yourself to be a truth you know that it can never be. You’re not a good man, Matthew. You’re not worthy of redemption. You’re a monster, a retch. A murderer.”
He turned away, disgusted and walked to the window, staring at Hope now, who had been joined by Ivy and Astryd..he felt a frown tug at his lips seeing his ex wife. Charlotte had risen to join him, staring at the former Mrs Knox.
“Ah, and theres your greatest achievement. Lying to her, and keeping the lie intact. Going as far as to have a baby you never intended to care about..and even now, wouldn’t it be so easy just to leave her all the way behind? You never did a thing for her anyw--”
“Shut up.” Knox snapped at her then, clinching his eyes shut and turning away from the view. He fought back the bile, the sickness of the statement. Fought against how cold he felt himself getting as the evidence mounted.
“And now, the sickest of ironies. The only way you can protect them? From a new monster, a man who’s more cruel than you could ever hope to be? Which, frankly, is impressive considering all the red in your ledger…”
Charlotte's slender fingers grasped his chin then, lifting his head and turning it toward the figure still staring at him with white, pupiless eyes. More blood ran now, from its nostrils and tear ducts. The plumage running from its head and down its back seemed to puff out as they locked eyes.
“You have to let go of your lies, and embrace who and what you are..”
Matthew felt his breath hitch, his throat burning as the weight crushed his chest. He didn’t want to be this man again. He couldn’t be. He couldn’t let Hope and Ivy see wat their dad had become..
“Now sod off with that, you twice dead Harlot.” the cockney accent suddenly cut through, the words and presence restoring warmth and ease to the raging storm between his ears and behind his eyes. He felt a familiar arm around his shoulders, and felt a sudden wave of emotion wash over him at his father’s touch.
“You embrace all that you are, Matty. The good, and the bad. You control your destiny, and you control what you are. Every man has his demons Matthew. And all of us think it wise to lock them away, never look them in the eye and deal with them...but that doesn’t work for men like us…”
Hugh lifted a hand, motioning to the creature who stood then from it’s chair, its stance rigid as it continued to stare at him..into him..through him.
“Become all that you are meant to be, boy.”
“Do what you must...and keep my grandbabies safe.”
-------
The nurse checked the man's vitals once more. His heart rate and BP both seemed to spike, but nothing came of it. He seemed to even out, as she picked up his chart and began jotting down notes. As she worked, she failed to notice the eyes suddenly shoot open.
She felt the steel cord like muscles in the arm that wrapped around her neck, and then nothingness as she slipped into unconsciousness. The man lowered her into the hospital bed, before ripping off his gown and snatching his clothing. He headed for an emergency exit, his gait smooth and calm. He stopped short of the door, catching his reflection in a window.
Two eyes, void of color stared back. A toothy, blood stained grin responded to the flat stone like expression upon his face.
“Meant...to be” He rasped, before throwing himself into the exit door. The alarms blared but The Raven had flown long before they pieced together that he wasn’t where he was supposed to be..
He’d been knocked unconscious before. More times than he can count which decidedly was not a good thing, especially when it came to the outlook of his later life. This time though it felt different. For one thing, and the most disconcerting part? He could hear the world around him this time, even after the switch had been flipped and everything between his ears went into a forced ‘rest mode’.
He felt himself pushed to get up, his body and muscles acting independent of the freshly severed mind that usually oversaw them. He heard the grunt of effort by the Supreme Machine, and felt a second warmth wash over him to pair with the blood flowing down his face. This was it. The end and oblivion finally come to collect. In an instant, the fight and the will to survive slipped through his fingers and he awaited the end eagerly..
But of course, once he wanted it it was torn away from him..
He heard JC charge in, heard the blows landing between the two big men sounding more like two bull bison fighting for mating rights than two men trading fists. He heard Amber Ryan’s voice, felt her hands move the hair from his face to expose the gash that bled freely, staining my skin and the floor with the color of my lifeblood.
He heard Ivy call out to him, Hope comforting her. Shouting, accusation, questioning. It all turned into a roar of white noise eternally lost to the ether as the pitch black he floated in slowly filled with a white hot light, cutting through like the Sun does every morning to the night. Only this light? It was devoid of life. Of warmth.
He felt a familiar chill crawl up the back of his neck….wait, he had a neck here?
“Hello, Ma t the w”
And like that, the endless void of white hot, arctic cold light was gone and he stood in an all too familiar bedroom, in an all too familiar house. There, seated upon his bed was an all too familiar devil.
And in that void, now a delusion and a graveyard he found his voice...
“Hello, Charlotte..”
-----
He was stable. That’s all they could do. That’s all they would tell her.
Hope sat in the sparse waiting area of the hospital. She hadn’t caught its name, hadn’t tried to. She picked at a loose thread on her sweater, mind simultaneously vibrating with every worst case scenario weighed down with a self inflicted guilt.
“Get Ivy to my dressing room.” He had made one request of her. And instead, she let Ivy convince her to go to catering. Get a snack before they were to be locked down in a room for the duration of the show with their father hovering nearby for all of it, the pang of Amber Ryan getting attacked no doubt weighing heavy on his mind. She let a sad smile play upon her face a moment. For a man so widely despised in some circles, her father was no doubt the most empathetic man she’d ever met.
Failures took root beneath his skin and in his heart like old redwood, and existed just as eternally. The entire ride from Vegas to Reno was quiet, save for Ivy’s phone and the music in her earbuds. Her father’s face was as still and quiet as his eyes screamed in a pent up rage and sadness.
And now, as it ended so many times, they were in a Hospital. This was the first time she had the ‘privilege’ of being present for the incident that put him here, and what's more she got to carry the yoke of guilt and shame for having caused it.
Not a drop of blood between them..
‘Because it's too busy staining the floor’ she thought to herself, eyes wandering up to the clock on the wall once more.
------
“I know i’m not fucking dead.” He rasped to the figure seated on the California King canopy bed. Her dark hair cascaded down past a slender pair of shoulders, to the small of her back. Her skin pale and cool as it was in both life and death. Her eyes, a pair of burning emeralds bore into his own.
Charlotte Knight, or as the world came to despise her..Charlie James.
“Do you?” her voice carrying the weight of a thick Scottish accent while still being light as a feather, “Just like you’re sure I am?” A wry smile, mocking.
“You are dead.” He bit back, eyes darting to the window and stomach falling to his knees. Charlotte catches the movement, but doesn’t follow. She knows. How could she not?
“So focused on that night. Even after a decade of my presence and you still think you lost something when I gave up the ghost..” a snort, “The living are so close minded.”
He didn’t respond, instead taking a moment to really absorb his surroundings. The room wasn’t how he had left it late last year. No, it was cleaner. Missing the layers of dust gifted to it by the decade and a half of neglect and avoidance,No, his mind had taken him to a happier time for the room. Back when it was just a room, and not a graveyard.
“You’re here because you need to be, and you know it.” She shifted her stancem uncrossing her leg and leaning forward onto it. His eyes drifted briefly to her cleavage, as ample as he remembered. He shifted his gaze almost immediately, feeling a bite of shame. Pearl would kill him..
Oh fuck, Pearl does she..
“Your little girlfriend knows, yes. But she’s in Baltimore and getting any kind of flight at the drop of a hat is a bear nowadays, isn't it?” Charlotte’s face cracked with a sneer that dripped equal parts malice and saccharine. “No, afraid it’s just little Hope here. All alone, but what else is new? She’s always alone, especially since you convinced her to move to Baltimore and then ran away from the city like a scalded dog.”
“Shut up.”
“No.” Came her curt, cold reply. “No, Matthew i’ve been silent for too long, let you stray on your own for too long and look where it’s gotten you. Hanging by a thread and without even the phantom of an idea of how to fix anything..and so selfish, too.”
“This all could have been evaded, Matthew. If you had just not goated on the unstable creature, if you hadn’t taken his bait. One would think that maybe it was intentional? Maybe, you really are craving the end still, eh Matthew?”
He remained silent, eyes averting out the window, to the ghost of a full moon that filled the room with an ethereal moonlight as bright as an afternoon sun but devoid of anything resembling the life affirming warmth.
He took a few steps then, to the bed and took a seat next to Charlotte. Quietly, he noted feeling no warmth from the woman next to him, either.
“No. No you are quite more suited to the other -cide. Or so Marv Nixon goes on about endlessly while the flames lick at his face and three dollar comb over,” He stiffened then, the subject causing his blood to go as cold as the rest of the room “And that’s why i’m here, Matthew. Why we’re here.”
“We?”
And in an instant, as if he had been sitting there the entire time a third figure joined them, seated in the corner in the old high-back chair. To anyone who would look in, they’d swear Matthew had just been joined by an identical twin. But no, something was...off about this figure. He sat cross legged in the big chair, dressed in Matthew’s old ring gear from FWF. His face painted in corpse paint with a Glasgow smile penciled in across his lips and cheeks, eyes each crossed out with an “X’. eyes that held no emotion, and no color. As white as the pain on the rest of the face.
It’s black hair, though. That was the giveaway. Because upon closer inspection, the hair that ran from the top of the figures head and all the way down its back? It wasn’t hair at all.
It was plumage.
Matthew stayed silent, but shook his head, “No.”
“You’ve run out of choices, Matthew.”
Charlotte's voice remained even and void of emotion, and for the first time she reached out and touched his hand. Her touch was as frigid as the arctic and brought an uneasy, queasy feeling to his stomach that instantly made him dizzy. He shook his head, eyes shifting back to the figure from hers. It’s lips spread into a grin now, a stream of blood running from each corner of the smile. Dark, black blood akin to the kind bled out from a corpse that had been sitting for a long, long time.
Years, even.
“Son, i’m no fan of hers or its but you need to hear ‘er out.”
His eyes snapped to the source of the thick, hoarse cockney accent then. And seated now in a chair by the window, elbows resting on a desk was an elderly gentleman with the face of a seventy year old but the mischievous fire in his eyes of a man a quarter of his age. Platinum white-gold hair slicked back and a neat goatee adorned upon his face. He wore a gray suit as he had to every Sunday service coming up.
Hugh Thomas Alano, the man who raised him. Who trained him in the ring and out of it.
One of many he couldn’t save.
“You are on borrowed time, my son. And the way you’re burnin’ through it, won’t be long until this turns to more than jus’ a visit.”
“Dad…”
“No talking, Matty. Not now.” The man stood up, walking with the sort of purpose afforded only to the patriarch of a family, he moves to the window and yanks the blinds aside. The moonlight, and the Monterey night were replaced suddenly by the image of the hospital waiting room in Reno, Nevada. By the image of the lone blonde girl, staring down at her feet and practically emanating guilt for what had come to pass.
“She blames herself.” Charlotte cut in, snapping him from his reverie “And if we’re being honest, it is almost as much her fault as it yours, Matthew.” His gaze shot to Charlotte, then suddenly white hot and protective.
“Don’t you d--”
“I said almost as much her fault, Matthew,” She disarmed him suddenly, her hand coming to rest upon his cheek. He felt the air leave him instantly, found himself leaning into the touch. The touch he had craved almost every night since he had lost it, until he had come to meet Pearl..
Pearl..
He snapped his cheek away, raising another arm and slapping the offending arm away from him.
“You knew the sort of danger you were putting them in, and yet you kept on,” Charlotte said flatly, his eyes shifting back to look at Hope and the moment dragging on so close and yet so far away. A paternal pang bit down upon his heart, and all he wanted was to go and hold her. Tell her it was okay and not to blame herself.
“You knew you couldn’t protect them. That entire time, you sat in Vegas playing guardian when you knew he wasn’t coming. Hoping he would do something to provoke you further because you wanted it, Matthew. Oblivion and the end..”
“No..”
“Son.” Hugh’s voice snapped his attention to the older man as it always had in life, “Son, are you trying to convince us, or yourself?” He motioned with his hands, toward an imaginary mountain of evidence.
“Matthew..my boy, I love you. Loved you since me and the missus brought you in. Loved watching you grow and become what I always knew you could be, but it wasn’t always easy. Every fight you shouldn’t have picked, every risk you took. It was obvious, to me as it was to the nuns who brought you up until I took over. You live with guilt, son. Blaming yourself for selfish addicts, internalizing the viciousness of the Knox’s...and I know how hard it was after I left you, son..”
Feeling like he had no one..didn’t belong. Hating everything and himself. All of it true. He chuckled, shaking his head and standing from the bed. He paced the room silently, as Hugh began to speak again.
“You came so close, and so slowly. Every day watching you poison yourself and hope it was the last one...I loathed ye for it, boy. I loathed that you had quit. Given up on ye, on your girls, on the business I brought you up and into.”
“Then you shouldn’t have left. Neither of you should have.” He snapped back suddenly, his body suddenly vibrating with rage “Throw yourself out of a window and trying to fight armed men by yourself in a drunken stupor to defend this fucking monument to your earnings, to your own success and failures.”
“You two, so educated in my suffering and my pain but you left me to suffer it alone. You offered a reprieve, you both….you meant so much to me. Hugh, the only one I could go to when I didnt understand something..and you” He pointed at Charlotte “You miserable, wretched bitch I loved you. I loved you with the intensity of a million white hot suns. And because you’re crazy, because you can’t act right you ...you”
He lost the words then, shaking his head, before shifting his gaze to the third figure.
“And You. I left you behind, buried you with everything and everyone else after I finally got right. You were the thing that pushed me too far, made me do fucking heinous things to people and myself. Sacrificed years of my life just to feed into..whatever the fuck you are”
“You, Matthew.” came Charlotte’s voice once more “He’s you, who you really are. The Raven. That Raze, that Ruin? That’s him. And he’s the only way you’re going to protect yourself, and those girls now”
“You have spent this year in your return in silent suffering, fighting to prove a lie you have been telling yourself to be a truth you know that it can never be. You’re not a good man, Matthew. You’re not worthy of redemption. You’re a monster, a retch. A murderer.”
He turned away, disgusted and walked to the window, staring at Hope now, who had been joined by Ivy and Astryd..he felt a frown tug at his lips seeing his ex wife. Charlotte had risen to join him, staring at the former Mrs Knox.
“Ah, and theres your greatest achievement. Lying to her, and keeping the lie intact. Going as far as to have a baby you never intended to care about..and even now, wouldn’t it be so easy just to leave her all the way behind? You never did a thing for her anyw--”
“Shut up.” Knox snapped at her then, clinching his eyes shut and turning away from the view. He fought back the bile, the sickness of the statement. Fought against how cold he felt himself getting as the evidence mounted.
“And now, the sickest of ironies. The only way you can protect them? From a new monster, a man who’s more cruel than you could ever hope to be? Which, frankly, is impressive considering all the red in your ledger…”
Charlotte's slender fingers grasped his chin then, lifting his head and turning it toward the figure still staring at him with white, pupiless eyes. More blood ran now, from its nostrils and tear ducts. The plumage running from its head and down its back seemed to puff out as they locked eyes.
“You have to let go of your lies, and embrace who and what you are..”
Matthew felt his breath hitch, his throat burning as the weight crushed his chest. He didn’t want to be this man again. He couldn’t be. He couldn’t let Hope and Ivy see wat their dad had become..
“Now sod off with that, you twice dead Harlot.” the cockney accent suddenly cut through, the words and presence restoring warmth and ease to the raging storm between his ears and behind his eyes. He felt a familiar arm around his shoulders, and felt a sudden wave of emotion wash over him at his father’s touch.
“You embrace all that you are, Matty. The good, and the bad. You control your destiny, and you control what you are. Every man has his demons Matthew. And all of us think it wise to lock them away, never look them in the eye and deal with them...but that doesn’t work for men like us…”
Hugh lifted a hand, motioning to the creature who stood then from it’s chair, its stance rigid as it continued to stare at him..into him..through him.
“Become all that you are meant to be, boy.”
“Do what you must...and keep my grandbabies safe.”
-------
The nurse checked the man's vitals once more. His heart rate and BP both seemed to spike, but nothing came of it. He seemed to even out, as she picked up his chart and began jotting down notes. As she worked, she failed to notice the eyes suddenly shoot open.
She felt the steel cord like muscles in the arm that wrapped around her neck, and then nothingness as she slipped into unconsciousness. The man lowered her into the hospital bed, before ripping off his gown and snatching his clothing. He headed for an emergency exit, his gait smooth and calm. He stopped short of the door, catching his reflection in a window.
Two eyes, void of color stared back. A toothy, blood stained grin responded to the flat stone like expression upon his face.
“Meant...to be” He rasped, before throwing himself into the exit door. The alarms blared but The Raven had flown long before they pieced together that he wasn’t where he was supposed to be..