Excerpt: Angels Under Glass

Somehow, going back home was like a death sentence. Every passing moment weighed as heavily as a lead coin underwater, hitting and imprinting on Inen's brain like tattoos. Food was uncomfortable to eat; people were weird to look at. He sat in the back of the train coming back into Londory, slouching down in his seat in the corner. His stomach felt unsettled, though by what he didn't know. It could have been hunger or it could have been nerves. It could have been nausea. He had popped a Vitamin C tablet before getting on and that had helped for all of two minutes. He curled one scraped up, splintered hand around his stomach gingerly and stared out the window without really seeing what was going past. His body swayed with the motion of the train, a constant rhythm. He wished he could have enjoyed it more. All it made him feel was carsick.

"Aderyn, do you have any painkillers?" he muttered thickly. Dropped his head against the cool window with a sigh of relief. His face was twisted up in an expression of severe distraste. There was a wall of mucus or sick in his throat that he had to clear just to be able to talk. He burped slightly afterward and it tasted like a two week long stomach flu. "Any at all?"

"I've got Tylenol." Blythe leaned around Aderyn to look at him. Her eyes were as puffy as they had been sixt hours ago in Arizona. He suspected that she was still rubbing them, trying to keep herself from breaking down again. He knew that she hated to let her weaknesses rule her; problem being, they often did.

"That'll be great, thanks," he said. She dug through her pack and handed him the tiny bottle. He took it, moving tenderly, and turned it over in his palm with a couple shakes to read the dosage information. It was not without a small, halfhearted smirk that he noticed the child proof cap was well worn, and, when he moved to pop the lid, that the threads were showing signs of stripping. He shook two pills into his palm as he double checked the dosage. He hated dry swallowing. He did it anyway, forcing the pills down with a grimace. "Thanks," he reiterated, faintly. Blythe said something too quiet to hear, probably dismissing his thanks with her normal grace.

From his peripheral vision, Inen could watch Aderyn as he dozed. Somehow, the blonde had managed to fall asleep despite the constant clamour of people getting on and off the train and the squeal of the wheels on the tracks. This train was particularly loud and sounded as though it were moments away from dropping apart at the hinges. He was distinctly reminded of the train he rode with Jeremy into the slums of Londory; just thinking about the young man made his stomach twist sharply with anxiety. The angelic version of a shank, it was. How he would have loved ot return the favour. Shifting slightly, he caught Aderyn's chin bobbing down against his chest and grinned tiredly with one corner of his mouth. Blythe, having fulfilled her good deed quota of the day, had turned so that she could rest her back against Aderyn's shoulder a bit and nod off as well. Her right foot braced in the corner the wall of the vehicle and the seat ahead of her made, her arms crossed loosely over her chest. The posture was defensive. Though he couldn't quite see her face, Inen imagined it would be distorted with her unconscious worries.

His eyes were heavy. He moved them with effort to the wall in front of him, covered in the usual graffiti that he could barely read. Unlike the trains he normally rode in Londory, the ones that made a strict circuit around downtown, this inter border train had something different about its graffiti. He could see some things that were written in an entirely different language, flowing script that seemed characteristic of it. There were a lot of crudely written things, too, though; scratched into the metal with car keys and pocket knives. 'Don't be so hetero' the largest one said, making him laugh through his nose. Underneath it, there was something that had been crossed out by another passenger. He contemplated leaning forward to attempt to discern it, but his body refused to cooperate. Feeling altogether quite gray, Inen breathed out carefully and slowly, tilting his head down against his chest like Aderyn. He closed his eyes, saw nothing but sand dunes and pyres in a row as far as his mind's eye could see, and heard every single thought that passed through his head.

He'd had moments like that before, right before bouts of intense migraines usually struck him in the middle of the night. His mind would not slow down. The words making up each thought weren't even discernable. They were like turning on all the television channels on at once and trying to make some sense of them, because even as he knew it was a stupid thing to try and do, and very much impossible, he unconsciously set out to do just that. Inen chewed the inside of his cheek. Resisted the urge to cover his ears as if that would make some kind of a difference. His bones had a weariness now that made his very core feel like it was aching. He could have cried from the frustration of it.

"Christ, Reed, why'd you have to go?" he breathed, knitting his brows over his closed eyes in restlessness.

"Huh?" Blythe's voice said, feeble in sleep. Without opening his eyes, he heard the rustle of her sitting up out of her sleeping position and leaning over to look at him again. He swallowed thickly, and it hurt, his throat inexplicably sore, like a huge, raw sore was right in the middle of his esophagus.

"Nothing, Blythe," Inen reassured her. "Talking to myself."

The girl relaxed again, clearing her throat, and Aderyn made a noise of confusion as her movement brought him to the place between asleep and awake. "Oh," she murmured in response to Inen's answer. It was good enough for her. Opening one eye slightly to the flourescent overkill glow of the train's interior, he ran his eyes over the two. Aderyn lifted his right arm and rested it across Blythe's shouler so she could lean more comfortably against him. Her wrist rested unconsciously over his knee, hand hanging limp and twitching whenever they passed over a speed bump. Within a few minutes, their mingled heavy breathing blissfully drowned out the sound of the music that was playing up near the front of the train. Inen scratched his temple with his free hand in weariness. He had half a mind to signal for a stop right then and just get off and go and he didn't know why. A passing fancy turned gripping need, as passing fancies often became. He shifted off of his sore hip and propped one foot against the wall ahead of him and locked his knee, as Blythe had done. Just ten minutes of sleep. That was all he needed.

He wanted to curl up in the corner and sleep for days. He could get off the train, or he could stay on the train and not move again for hours. Were other guardian angels' deaths supposed to be so painful to accept? Not even painful, which might have been something of a relief because then at least Inen could go and do something to get that anger and pain out -- take a few more painkillers and take a run around the city a few times. It was heavy, a blanket of guilt and fear that stuck itself into the back of his head, in that little box that held all his miscellaneous thoughts, and seeped over all of them like a spilled drink. He knew that he'd be seeing the pyre in his head whenever he tried to go to sleep for weeks afterward. And Inen would probably even go out of his way as he laid in bed at night to conjure up what he remembered; the smell of a burning body, burning wings; the sound of the flames that reminded him of the oak tree on fire. He wasn't sure if he'd even be able to light a cigarette for a couple of days without getting the jitters. He wasn't sure if he was supposed to be feeling the effects of Reed's death as hard as he was. It was like Blythe said; it felt like he'd watched him die. Something Inen would never want to know was how it had happened.

Thinking about it too hard made him sick. The inside of his mouth had begun to water uncontrollably the way it did when he was about to be ill. Wiping the back of his mouth with the back of his hand, Inen swallowed and sank down into the poorly padded seat. His arms were trembling for no apparent reason and if he tried to tense them or support them, they only shook worse. Inen flexed the fingers of his right hand as it rested around his upset stomach, experimental, and sighed unevenly. He couldn't keep his eyes open anymore; the 'two weeks of flu' kind of uneasy sleep had gotten him.