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“It- heh- I was playing poker.” A half chuckle and he shrugged. And then twisted just as Rabbit’s OH connected with SHIT in his brain. The card was still in his hand when the wind abruptly left him.
A sick marriage of adrenaline and cortisol kicked him in his metaphorical teeth, and Toad helped his body to find the ground faster than his brain could stop it. The happy couple sat on his ribs while the officiant watched, knife still in hand. There was no pleasure to be found here, beyond the chemical illness that was rushing, clawing, hoping for this to finally be enough, to bring his brain into unity. The organic compounds didn’t line up quite right until there was a gun to his head. Or a knife between his ribs. Either way, he was dialed the fuck in, hopped up on fear, high on sensory input.
There’s an intimacy in being stabbed. It’s very straight-forward. The person doing it becomes the most important being in your life. You hang your next breath on their own humanity, on their own capacity to fail. Very rare that someone tries to stab you when they aren’t aiming to kill you, Rabbit has learned. He has also learned what Toad’s sweaty hand felt like against his glove, and can feel the clammy skin on his own remembering and adjusting and reforming the situation. That somehow felt more violent, more grotesque than anything that happened before or since, but to continue playing it over and over and over in his mind would be a failure to recognize the other, more pressing matter.
“I think people can overcome, too.” Toad became very important, just now. Center of the universe, private audience. ”Just not all people.”
“You’re working for the Bianco family?” The way his voice shook couldn’t be avoided, the words had to come out, leaping like scared frogs onto the pavement in front of him, importuning Toad for answers the way a starving cat begs for food.
Toad’s voice started steadier than he’d been prepared for, chilled with a righteous indignation left untreated for years. “Yeah,” he halfway sighed, “this whole odd-job shit. It’s hard.” As soon as the words left, some of the anger thawed, leaving his shoulders like thick slabs of snow. The casual way he snatched the phone from shaking bloody gloves turned Rabbit’s stomach. “It’s fucking demeaning. Everyone you talk to is your boss.” The phone snapped in two, and the brief illusion of control shattered in full right along with it. He kept talking with slithering, poisonous contempt. “I don’t wanna hear shit about loyalty. They don’t give a fuck about you. Dispatch, the Service, they don’t give a fuck.” He turned sharply away, leaving Rabbit to writhe on the pavement.
A worm of honest betrayal burrowed it’s way quickly from his chest to his mouth. He didn’t have to ask, it was a waste of precious precious time. He knew it too, as the slight lift of Toad’s eyebrow as he begged preemptively confirmed it for him.
“Hey, that story about the homeless guy. Was that real?”
“He didn’t freeze,” He didn’t pause, he barely even turned back, just continued with an irritated smirk. “It’s L.A., man. It’s a game.”
Then Toad left, swept the sidewalk with his feet, the scratching still echoing down the street with the flap of distressed shoe soles accompanying it. The answer turned over in his head. A groan slipped out, while his head lolled over and his body strangling itself to get moving, doing his resolute best to ignore it.
Once both feet were vaguely on the ground, the terror snow plowed ahead of him crumbling the thudding pain in his chest. It still echoed through him like a hammer on a nail. The pavement hit his feet and the sour ache of exhaustion went up to rattle his fingertips, sending acrid spasms down to the pit of his stomach. All parts only just functional, the vertical aspect of the operation struggled to be maintained. And then the matter of his head.
Rabbit didn’t feel linear, more woven into a minute and a half where it all happened at one time. Each strand of the memory was stuck with him, seperate from the next one, but overlapping just enough to be disorienting. Like the VHS was playing that part again, but skipping 40 seconds to the next part, and then cutting back 16 seconds to go over the layout of the space, and on and on. His phone was gone, so he had to stand. He got stabbed so he needed to talk to someone. His phone was torn in two, so it wasn’t in his pocket. He kept it all in an order (just not a particularly well managed one), jumping from reason A to reason Q to reason C, to dizzying affect. Maybe that was the blood loss. Reason T to be on an impromptu jog, he had to reschedule with his sponsor.
Cohesion between pieces of him waned. a child in the corner sobbing loudly and brightly, desperate for the ache in his inner ear to go away. The hyper-competent adult with one contact in his phone. And the addict rattling in a cage, seizing and foaming. That’s the one he needed right now, cause it knew where the phone booth was.
The tape skipped again, where he knew he had gone from point A to point B, but only one thing turned over and over in his mind. The gritty feeling of the pavement meeting his back. His eyes were shiny when he got to the parking lot, tears sparkling under the yellow dusty light.
A belittling thought rushed over him, that of a child running to their parent in the middle of the night, desperate for comfort. His stomach flipped once more, separating him from his body.
Rabbit felt anguish bubble over, thinking of his dad’s hand reassuringly sat on the back of his neck, and resolutely pushed his way forward through the memory.
The phone booth was fast approaching, with his half-run becoming more of a mostly-walk right up until it made its final transformation into a teetering stop. The gloved hands that Rabbit supposedly owned shook and shook and mashed the buttons and shoved the coins into the slot, all while his brain ran in circle after circle of why his heart should slow just a little bit more, and why his breath should calm, but none of this mattered. It was his body and his hands and his brain and his breathing, and it didn’t feel like it. It felt like being 4, waiting for his dad to come back to the car so he could come with him into the grocery store, and seeing his ice melt in his soda. The car was so big, and the buckles on his chair were hard, and he wanted to pick the cereal for breakfast, but his dad wasn’t coming back, and then he’s bleeding in front of a phone booth, scared to hit the wrong numbers because there’s no more coins this is his one shot there’s no more coins there’s no more coins-
And the phone started ringing, and a little part of him cried because it hurt just as much to carry his own brain as it would carrying a wounded, screeching toddler. He yanked the phone from its holster, and crumpled down. He stared at the pavement, grim and harsh. The idea that his own fear could push him so far over the edge, that he needed, that he- that he wanted to be held. His nose wrinkled, stuffed up and painful, in disgust. It was late though. It was dark out. He was scared. He wanted his dad to come to him, find him in the car, waiting. Free him, carry him into the store, let him pick out Trix so he could get the spoon in the box. And Rabbit shrank in again, his breath hiccuping over itself. His dad didn’t do that then, either.
A shiver of long and old grief nearly buckled him then, but he wasn’t inline with time today. The ringing phone, though it felt like it had been a day and a half since he had dialed the number, finally ceased. His throat clamped down on the whine that threatened, his gloves squeaked against the hard plastic casing. He leaned on the pay phone, huffing the air and begging for competency.
“Hi, I’m Rabbit and-,”