Crossover Fan Fiction ❯ Monday Morning ❯ The Longest Night ( Chapter 1 )

[[Disclaimer: All of the characters included in this fiction that are from other works, including Pirates of the Caribbean, InuYasha and Yu-Gi-Oh do not belong to me, but their respective owners. Characters that you do not recognize however, are mine, including (but not limited to), Meg, Max, and Kim. Thank you.]]

 

 

Monday Morning

The Longest Night

 

It was 3am when the knock came to the door. It was one of those nights where you have to wonder about the world, because everything looks so perfect that nothing awful could possibly happen in it. The sky was clear, and every single star sparkled like a diamond that the gods threw into the vast blackness merely for their beauty and the enjoyment of the people on earth. It was a calm, still night, and everything was quiet, serene. The early-October temperature allowed it to be fairly cool, but still warm enough to be comfortable at the same time.

In the seventh-floor apartment that could probably use a little maintenance, a sleepy, bleary-eyed man forced himself out of bed and rubbed the sleep away from his eyes, trying to figure out and register in his brain what the tiny green numbers on the digital clock were telling him. 3:12am. Shoving away the tangled and wrinkled sheets that he'd previously been sleeping under, he rolled out of bed and groped around in the darkness for clothing, the insistent knocking on the front door still echoing through the apartment.

Finally able to locate pants and a shirt (wrinkles in fabric stopped mattering a long time ago), he stumbled down the hall and towards the front door, still in the stupor of sleepiness that resulted from being torn from his warm bed so late at night.

Fumbling childishly with the lock for a moment or two, he managed to pull open the door, a confused expression on his face, eyes still half-closed in sleep.

He wasn't pleased with what he saw. Two police officers dressed in identical blue uniforms, weapons, the whole works, stood in front of him, carrying their hats in their hands and something he couldn't identify at the moment. He was only concerned with trying to figure out an explanation why they were there.

“I didn't do anything,” he managed to grunt, thinking they were there to arrest him for something, drowsiness still taking a firm hold over his mind.

One of the men held up a free hand. “We're not here to arrest you for anything. May we come in?”

The half-awake man moved so he was taking up the doorway, suspicion overpowering the drowsiness. “Why?”

A moment or two of arguing followed. The man was reluctant to let the police into his home, and the police didn't want to speak to him in the hallway so informally like this.

After a while they gave in and held up the object they had in their hands besides their hats. “Do you recognize this?”

Studying it intently for a moment, the man discovered with a jolt that he did. Knew it very well in fact. Something cold was growing in the pit of his stomach as he looked at the object, a black leather wallet with lime green trim, various stickers with funny or insulting quotes on them plastered in various places. The man nodded in reply to the question, eyes focused on the wallet. It shouldn't be here. Something wasn't right.

As he woke up more fully, he began to think. To remember. Remember that there was an empty place beside him on the bed in the other room, that there had been a visit home, that there was going to be a welcome home the next morning when she came back.

This wallet shouldn't be here. It should be with her. It had all her cards in it, her ID, her money.

The officer opened up the wallet, the lime green interior standing out gaily from the black leather, and read off the card located inside, though the policeman already knew the answer he'd receive. The man standing in front of him was identical to the man in the photograph inside the wallet, the man who had his arms wrapped around the girl, his cheek against hers, both of them smiling happily at the camera, blissfully unaware that this same girl now lay still and silent, the smile gone from her face.

The officer turned the wallet around to show the man the picture, knowing how stupid the question sounded, and also how hollow his voice was. “Do you know this woman?”

The man's insides constricted with an unknown fear, and nodded again. Of course he recognized her. He more than recognized her. He knew every curve of her face, every fiber of her body, every scar, every hair. He knew the feel of her skin, the smell of her favourite lotion, every separate fleck of colour in her eyes. Everything about her.

But her wallet shouldn't be here. That picture shouldn't be here.

The officer took a deep breath. The connection between the two of them was painfully obvious in the photograph. This was the part no one prepared him for in training. The part that he always tried to shut out when he went home at night. The part he hated.

“I'm afraid we have some bad news.”

The man waited, expectant, on edge, almost hysterical. The split second between now and his next words was endless. What bad news? Who about? Why wasn't he speaking, taking forever to continue? His mind reeled.

“There's been an accident…”

Those four words changed the man's life forever. Four words seems so little, but they haunted him for the rest of his life, whispering to him in his sleep, prodding at him in the back of his mind, because these were the words that brought the rest of the sentences, explanations, stories, things that he never wanted to hear, never dreamed he would hear.

Yes, there had been an accident. The man didn't hear much at that time. He didn't know what had happened. He didn't know why. All he knew was what he'd let them tell him, what he'd managed to get through his mind before he shoved them out of the way and bolted out the door, not even caring how he was going to manage it, just knew that he had to get there.

All he knew was that she was hurt. He refused to register anything else.

 

 

Twenty minutes later, his figure illuminated in the darkness by the flashing red and blue lights of the police cars and ambulance, the man nearly fell out of his car in his haste to get to the scene, only to be blocked by a line of “Do Not Cross” police tape, the bright yellow mocking him, such a bright colour in the darkest time of his life. No one around him was telling him anything. It was like it was this huge secret, that somewhere in the murmurings of walkie talkies and the quiet conversations of paramedics and police officers, the questioning of two individuals who were handcuffed and sitting in the back of separate squad cars, there was something everyone knew but him.

He demanded to know this secret, the truth, wanting to know anything to replace the unknown, not knowing that the truth would be colder and more devastating, that the truth would almost kill him in the pain it contained.

And he was told. Told everything. And as the officer spoke, explained, expressed sympathy, his heart stopped. Then started. Followed by stubborn disbelief. It wasn't true. It couldn't possibly be true. She was out of town, he insisted, visiting. She wouldn't be home until morning, he steadfastly told them, his words almost dying in his mouth as he spotted her car. What remained of her car. A death trap of mutated metal that was twisted more into a ball than anything, off the side of the highway. It no longer looked like a car.

But that meant nothing. Nothing at all. She wasn't in there when that happened to her car. Someone had hit it after she got out to straighten all this out with the police and paramedics. She was sitting in the back of the ambulance right now, he told himself, explaining that she wasn't hurt, this was all a mistake, she'd just tripped and skinned her elbow while getting out of her car or something like that and someone had reported it to the police, which started this whole misunderstanding.

He couldn't stand the sympathetic looks of the officers around him. They were wasting their pity, because nothing was wrong. It wasn't true. It just wasn't. It couldn't possibly be.

It was a simple cloth on the ground that became his proof. A cloth that hid her from his sight, hid her pain, her suffering, her agony in the last moments of her life. But it couldn't hide the truth. And the truth lie in the blood, the blood that had seeped through the fabric so he could see it, the blood that had not long ago, run, life-giving, through her veins.

His beloved lay under that cloth, her breath forever stilled. And the truth hit him like a rock.

Her name came out as a hoarse gasp, as if by saying it, he could somehow get her to come out from under there, laugh and stick her tongue out at him, telling him that he should have seen his own face, that this was all a joke she planned out for him, a cruel, twisted joke. Then he could take her into his arms again, kiss her and tell her over and over how much he loved her, how she was his entire world. He spoke her name, a name that would become sacred for him until the day he died.

“Meg…”

A single murmur, and he couldn't stand up from the pain of his grief as reality hit him, fell to the paved ground, and, for the first time since he was a child, he cried, cried until there was nothing left in his body, and nothing to replace the indescribable pain he now felt, would always feel from now on.

And the quiet, starry night looked on.