Here comes the sun (Cai, Zoe, Rachel)

[runrachelrun.insanejournal.com]

Despite almost everyone telling Cai to sleep last night, he’d stayed up much longer. Something in him had decided that he could only go to sleep after making sure that Zoe was asleep, and since Zoe seemed to be much better at staying awake than he was, this was difficult.

He spent the night at Zoe’s, in her living room. At first they googled every instance of Smith street they could find and talkedto the rescue team on the internet, then, because nothing else could be done tonight, because everyone had gone to sleep, because they were both so tired they could barely keep their eyes open, they put the television on and watched late nigh infomercials.

Zoe’s head was still pounding so bad she’d taken some codeine, which was probably the only reason she eventually closed her eyes. After that, Cai finally felt he could close his, and sank into sleep almost instantly, wrapped in a blanket on an armchair, just a few feet from Zoe who was stretched on the sofa.

He woke midmorning, aware of the noises of the house waking up around him but not quite willing or able to open his eyes. There were female voices talking quietly in the kitchen and every now and then a burst of noise from Hope who was incapable of remembering to be quiet for very long. The kitchen smelled of breakfast, and the thought of food both turned his stomach and made it growl with longing. Food. Cai dragged himself into the kitchen and ate with the Kemps, trying hard to be polite though his energy levels were so low he just wanted to grunt answers to everything. Cai wasn’t normally the type of teenage boy to communicate through grunts, but they didn’t seen offended. Zoe was being even less communicative than he was anyway. All she wanted to talk about was the plan; who was going with who to which Smith Street and what they would do when they got there.

It was a bad time to talk about kissing. Not that Cai knew what he wanted to say anyway.

Breakfast bled into lunch somewhat as Liz kept prying them with tea. Zoe had revived enough to spend conversation after conversation on the phone with Peter, with Deirdre, with Bentley even. “I’m going to Wales,” she said, after one such conversation, sitting down at the kitchen table opposite Cai.

Cai nodded because he was so swept up in events he had to nod; of course she was going to Wales. To face down an Incubus and save Danny. Of course that’s what she was going to do.

“Rachel posted,” he said, sliding his phone across the table for her to see Rachel’s post open on the screen. Her face darkened with worry as she tapped out her reply.

Still they didn’t talk much, just short, business-like sentences like “You’ll go get her?” and “Text if you hear anything” and “Right…” and then Cai was getting back in his car and hoping that his body and his mind were in sync enough to handle driving.

Rachel told him she’d got off the tube at Limehouse station but by the time he reached it she’d wandered away and it took another couple of phone calls to find her. She was at King Edward VII Memorial park, sitting on the fence at the edge of the Thames. Below her was a drop of a couple of metres, then a shoreline of little rocks and seagulls before the water began. The top of the iron fence was concrete, covered in years of yellow and white lichen, old gum, and graffiti.

“Hey,” Cai said, from a little way away. He didn’t want to startle her. Rachel didn’t talk much about her relationship with rivers but he knew enough about her family to know that it wasn’t a great one.

She turned to look at him but it took a moment for the recognition to show on her face. He could tell she was drunk even before he got close enough to smell the cloud of alcohol around her. “Careful now,” he said, gently.

“Psssh,” she said, swinging her legs back over to the right side of the fence but stumbling when he legs failed to support her. Cai caught her, and she wrapped her arms around him and held on so Cai had to force himself to stay out of that vision-place.

“Come on,” said Cai. “Let’s get you in the car, yeah?”

Rachel swayed gently backwards. “Yeah.”

“Unless you think you’re going to be sick,” Cai added. “Then we could sit on the park benches for a bit.”

Rachel shook her head. “Not going to be sick,” she said, though he doubted her ability to self-diagnose right now. He got her back to the car, one arm looped around her back, drawing quite a few looks from families in the playground as they walked past. He tried to ignore them.

“How much have you had to drink?” Cai asked, once they were in his car and he’d found his water bottle and passed it onto her. She drank the smallest mouthful possible.

“Dunno,” she said. “Left my bottle somewhere.” It had probably been empty anyway. She didn’t remember. She’d started it last night and had just kept going. Her head hurt like someone fired an arrow through it. She was starting to slip into hungover even though she was still drunk. That was the worst. She took another mouthful of water but it was as miniscule as the first; she couldn’t handle more than that.

Cai’s car seats were hot. They scorched the back of her legs, made her bare skin stick. The air was warm in her lungs but she still felt cold, and her legs were trembling. She tried pressing the water bottle against her thigh but it was too cold and made her shudder so she let it roll out of her hand and down by her feet.

“What?” she aked, becoming aware that Cai was talking to her but she hadn’t heard any of it.

“I said, you okay to come over to my place?”

“Mm,” Rachel said, nodding like her head weighed too much. Cai’s car rumbled into life. Rachel stared at her hands lying limp on her legs.

They looked so… inactive? Lifeless? Useless. She stared for a while, till the image of Danny lifting her hand tenderly to his lips struck her so hard she gasped – tensed like an iron rod.

Cai, driving, didn’t notice, and Rachel’s eyes widened in horror at her life. She tried to push the memory down, deep down but it stuck in her mind – the soft press of Danny’s lips and the scent of him and the safety that radiated from him – all these things were viscerally close, the memory of them deep in her own skin and she couldn’t repress it. She wasn’t eleven anymore, repressing any and every good memory of her brother so it wouldn’t hurt so much without him. She was eighteen – bigger and older and capable of holding so much more pain inside her.

Or maybe forgetting was just harder the second time around. Maybe she couldn’t. Maybe there was only so much space in her mind to commit to forgetting. Maybe she’d force Danny deep deep down and that would force bits of her own life to bob to the surface like… well, she supposed like she must have. Bobbed to the surface as the rest of the car sank. Why didn’t her dad ever tell her about the man who rescued her? Should that type of person be a family hero? Shouldn’t – Rachel jolted herself physically out of her thoughts – see this was just the type of thing she didn’t want to be thinking.

She didn’t want to be thinking about anything. Anything anything at all. She wished she had another bottle. She wished she could drink herself into a coma and never wake up and never have to work out how to live in this goddamned evil hellhole of a world.

“Rach?” Cai had noticed her jolt like something had stung her. “What’s wrong?”

Everything, she thought. “Look at my legs go,” she said, instead. Her legs were shaking quite a lot, muscles trembling all the way down her body.

“Why’re they doing that?” Cai asked, risking a quick glance down as he guided the car onto a busier road.

Rachel poked her thigh, a little below the exposed pockets that hung out the bottom of her shorts. “Meds I think,” she said. “Don’t think I’ve taken them for a few days.”

“Oh Rach,” Cai said. “Why not?”

Rachel tried to pull her shorts down like they had a chance in hell of stretching far enough to cover all her legs. “Didn’t see the point,” she whispered.

“Rach,” he said again.

“Don’t. I don’t want to be me anymore. I don’t care. Fuck meds.” She said it without much strength, without much of anything.

“Rach,” her name again. But he felt he had to keep naming her, to remind her who she was. “I know things are shitty but you can’t stop taking your meds.”

“Please don’t be too mad at me,” Rachel murmured, speaking directly to a spot on the dashboard. “I’m not very good at this.”

“I don’t care how good you are at anything,” Cai said. He hadn’t realised he’d sounded angry, but as soon as she pointed it out he realised he was. But angry and torn up and afraid and nearly as lost as she was. Nearly, not quite. “I just care that you are something. Anything. Stay… just stay, Rach just… just figure out a way to stay you, for when he gets back, because he’ll need you. You might be… he loves you, Rach. You might be the only one who… There’s…”

This had been why Cai didn’t want to talk about Danny while he was driving. Why he hadn’t told her straight away that Danny was alive, for now alive, and that Zoe was launching a rescue mission as they spoke.

Maybe it had been stupid to hope that he could wait till they were safe at home before falling apart, but that’s what he hoped.

He could barely see through his teary eyes enough to pull over safely. Rachel didn’t say anything while he killed the engine –illegally parked in the middle of someone’s driveway- and bent over the steering wheel, gripping it, frozen around it like he’d been stabbed. For a second she was afraid he might have been, till he breathed against and turned back to her.

“Rach, what if after this he’s more lost than you are?”

Rachel stared at him with startled, bloodshot eyes.

“I won’t let you go,” Cai said. “But you have to find a way to hold onto Danny, too.”

“He’s really alive?” Rachel whispered. Someone had insisted he was. Zoe? Cai? They blurred together.

Cai nodded, because details would have started him sobbing. He wouldn’t risk steering anywhere close to those most dangerous two words for now. “Yes,” he added, because she looked like she needed real words to make it true. “We saw it. Zoe – going – find him.”

She blinked at him slowly, and when she opened her eyes again she found she could finally focus on seeing him. This kid who’d lost his brother but who had still come to find her even though she was a mess who could barely string two thoughts together and he was a mess who looked like he was having a heart attack he was gripping the wheel so tightly she could see his arms shaking under his long sleeves and the black gloves he was wearing to protect himself were clamped around the steering wheel or they would have been shaking too.

Rachel reached out and covered his gloved hands with her and slowly but firmly pried them off the wheel. She was right, they were shaking as hard as the rest of him. Harder than her legs maybe. Except he wasn’t shaking because of medication, he was shaking because of the world.

She took his hands and pressed them between hers and before she knew it she was singing, her voice thin and tuneless at first. “Here comes the sun,” she started at a whisper. “Here comes the sun and I say, it’s alright.”

She didn’t know all the words, but she tried. Her brother had known all the words, when he sang them to her while they waited for an ambulance. He’d been so musical though, he’d always been musical. She wished she didn’t remember that. Tears were pouring from her eyes. “Here comes the sun,” she focused on Cai, because he was alive and here and was trying to save her so she could save Danny.

“Do do do do,” croaked Cai, and they both burst into laughted-laced-tears till someone banged loudly on the hood of the car and told them to fuck off out of his driveway.

Cai started breathing like a woman in labour again, his movements stiff as a robot (a pregnant robot in labour?) as he put the car back into gear and backed out onto the street again.

It was a miracle they made it down the road till he found a legal parking spot. Cai touched the bullet in his chest and thanked God for his blessing but he knew that down the street was as far as he could make it. He was too shaken and too upset, too sleep deprived to drive. He parked and wound the window down and pressed his forehead against the steering wheel and grabbed for Rachel’s hand with one of his.

“Sorry Rach,” he muttered. “Don’t think I can get us home.”

“S’okay,” she said. She didn’t care where they went. Sitting in a hot car was pretty horrible but so was everything. She closed her eyes and after a moment, because she couldn’t bear the silence, she hummed the chorus again.

“Shit, Rachel Eos,” he breathed her full name. “You’ve got some sorta power in you.” He'd grown up with songs full of power but here in the car he'd never heard anything sound more like a hymn.

She stopped humming, confused. What on earth did he mean? He was looking at her like she’d given him something when she hadn’t; she’d just sung bits of an old song and held his hand.

“Okay,” he said, like he’d found a new cache of strength. Did he think it had come from her? That was stupid. She was not the strong one. She was the one that fell apart over and over. “Gonna call home,” he said as he slowly extract his phone from his pocket and, with hands that still shook, managed to do so. He spoke to home for a while. “Dom’s going to rescue us,” he told Rachel, when he was done. “One of our neighbours can give him a lift over here. It’ll be about half an hour though, sorry.”

“No…” Rachel said, shaking her head because it was stupid to be sorry about something like that. What was he sorry for? For finding someone to help them? Two someones, Dom and the neighbour, to band together and come and drive them home?

Rachel felt so lost but for the second time today someone was going out of their way to find her. First Cai, then his grandpa. It was just so unexpected. She’d seen adults band together to help Zoe but that’s because it was Zoe who was clever and brilliant and strong. Not kind of useless at life and drunk and a thief and a liar.

She wanted to ask him what he’d meant about some sorta power but she was afraid he’d take it back.

They sat in the car while they waited, windows down to let in the breeze, and Cai got the strength in his voice back by telling her all about Dom. Dom was one of the big heroes of the community, Cai said. Dom welcomed everybody as they moved in and kept in touch with those who moved out and remembered everyone’s name at church, and what year their kids were in and how they liked their tea. Their neighbourhood was populated by widows and widowers and a handful of old couples that were still together, and Dom knew all of them because he’d mowed their lawns for years. Cai had started going with him as soon as he could be trusted with a lawn mower or pruning sheers, and had proved himself an excellent roof-climber and gutter-clearer while Dom sat with the old couple and chatted away like best friends.

Cai had a lot of Dom stories. Rachel listened more intently than she’d ever listened at school. She could almost forget about everything else, so long as Cai didn’t stop talking. He didn’t, either, even when she closed her eyes, just resting them at first but she’d spent the night drinking instead of sleeping and had hit the end of her strength. He kept talking though, even when she started snoring.

And when their neighbour finally pulled up nearby and let Dom out, Cai piled out of the car and into his arms and held on for a long, long time.