Title:Little By Little
Note: Swearing. Lots of it.
Song Lyrics are from Little By Little from Oasis
Continued in Whatever We Lose
How long had she been gone for? Why hadn’t he been able to keep her with him? Why was everything so goddamn screwed up?
Finlay didn’t want to think. He wanted to get drunk off of whatever he could get cheap – it wasn’t as if he could taste it anyway. But he had no money for drink. The ISS had finally caught up with him, and he no longer had a penny to his name. He didn’t even know what the FBI had come after him for. Oh, he’d done plenty of things to warrant FBI involvement, and plenty more that would draw the cops. The 6’1” man with hair as black as the midnight shadows and dark, mouthwatering, go-to-hell looks just didn’t know which of his crimes they were coming after him for. And in the crossfire, as they ran from the small, rundown building, he’d lost her.
He didn’t know if she was alive. No one had seen her. He’d paid off people with the last of his stash of snow – he didn’t smoke the stuff, but it brought in a nice profit – and had them check all the hospitals in the area. There was no sign of her. When he had returned to the scene after the government had left it, she hadn’t been there either.
Annie Sullivan had disappeared from the face of the earth, as though she had never existed.
Finlay smashed the empty glass bottle he held in his hand onto the sewer grid, just to hear it shatter. Of all the people in this hellhole of a city that the feds could have gone after, they had gone after him. He should have felt a glow of pride at the fact that he had escaped them. Instead, all he felt was hollow, because Annie hadn’t. Whoever Finlay’s god of the moment was, for he was certain that they switched around or their life would be very boring, he had done a hell of a lot more than woken up on the wrong side of his bed. The fucker had woken up on the wrong side of the universe and taken Finlay there with him, just so that the bastard could see how much havoc he could wreck on Finlay’s life. At least, that was how he saw it. And in the misery of the cold, rainy night without Annie, Finlay didn’t give a good damn if anyone else saw it a different way.
There was no karma in Finlay’s world. Besides, he had done plenty of good things. He’d saved Annie from a rapist once. It didn’t matter that the rapist had been Annie’s own father or that she had been about to key the son of a bitch’s eyes out. He had been there, and he had been the one to kill that bastard Joe Sullivan. Just because he couldn’t think of a good thing that he had done other than that that didn’t benefit him didn’t mean he hadn’t done them – it just meant he was too busy thinking about Annie to fill his head with anything else.
Annie. Why wasn’t she there? He wandered drunkenly down the street despite the fact that he was stone cold sober, unless it was possible to get drunk off of sorrow. Out of an empty gap in a dilapadated wall that might once have been a window, music flowed out. Little by little/The wheels of your life they're slowly fallin off/Little by little/You have to give it all in all your life. Slowly falling off? Ha. There was nothing slow about it.
People passed by on the street. The color seemed to have been drained out of it so that everything and everyone was in black and white, and moving so slowly it felt as though it were all underwater. In every person that walked past him, he saw Annie’s face, the dark strawberry blond hair, the nose, slightly crooked from being broken during a baseball game when she was nine, her wonderfully overfull bottom lip, and that sexy mole just under her left eye. Her eyes. Oh dear God her eyes. They could bring him to his knees at twenty paces, especially when she had worked up a good mad and was spitting fire at him, turning her emerald colored eyes to smoke, nearly black with passion.
He watched a little girl play with jacks on the front steps of her rundown apartment building. Annie had wanted children. He twisted the band of fool’s gold on his finger. Annie had a matching one, as well as a real ring. In the eyes of the law they were both single. In the secret courts of human hearts, Finlay and Annie had been married for years. Something resembling a smile began to form on his face, until he heard the song the girl was singing softly.
We the people fight for our existence/We don't claim to be perfect but we're free/We dream our dreams alone with no resistance/Fadin' like the stars we wish to be/Y'know I didn't mean/What I just said/But my god woke up on the wrong side of his bed
He strode rapidly towards and alley, his mind running in circles, feeling dizzy and sick. It was the same song. The same goddamned song. He had long since learned that there were no Atheists in the front line of a battle. Apparently, there were none when the one you loved was missing either. He wanted Annie. Why did his god do this to him? What the hell had he ever done? Annie needed to come back. She had to. He needed her with him.
Out of hope, out of luck, Finlay sank to the ground of the alley and wished desperately for a bottle. But he wished more for Annie Sullivan.
.
Get your own Free Website now!