I Won't Let Us Fail [ARCHIVED]

When the bullet enters Hi’s brain, he shatters into pieces.

The only way Tory can explain it is that when they flare, when she pictures each of them in her head, they are like little golden glass lights, and she knows who each one is. Their thoughts and memories pulse there.

So when the Gamemaster fires his gun, Hi shatters before he hits the ground. His body drops with a dull thud, but everything else, everything he was or maybe still is, flies outwards through their heads and lodges into their brains.

Tory is staring numbly at his body on the ground a few minutes later as Kit tries to shield them all when she realises that the memory of falling into the sea off the coast of Morris Island is not her own. It feels like her own, lodged in there as firmly as any, but it’s Hiram’s.

She starts to scream and she doesn’t stop until they put her in the back of a car.

They put her next to Ben, which is probably a mistake because she thinks she wants to kill him right now.

She thinks that. Hiram, who appears to have taken up residence in her head, apparently does not, because when she sees his tear-streaked face she feels a wave of powerful affection that she knows is not her own.

“Ben,” she chokes out.

“He’s in my head,” Ben whispers. “Parts of him are in here.”

So she’s not going crazy.

“Mine too,” she murmurs back. “I remember being a toddler and falling off the jetty.”

“He hit his head.” Ben looks on the verge of tears. “I felt it. I know how it felt.”

Tory remembers Ben then, eight years old and round faced and pink cheeked. She knows as easily as she would any memory that it’s his birthday party and that they’re in Hi’s bedroom before they painted the walls, and that after this they went to play in the sand. She remembers that Shelton was ill.

“I’m so sorry,” Ben chokes. “Is he here? Does he know I’m sorry?”

“I don’t know what this is,” Tory says. She wants to claw it out, because it’s not hers, it’s something stuck in there like a tick that’s burrowed under the skin, but there’s nothing else left of Hi.

She looks out of the window and sees him. The storm is too severe for the police who have arrived to really secure the scene, but they haven’t moved him yet. He’s still lying in the road, blood pooling around his skull, eyes wide open.

They put Shelton in a different car. She can see the outline of him hunched over in his seat, trembling like a leaf. It’s impossible to tell whether it’s the shock of what’s just happened or if he has shards in his head too.

“My mom’s gonna be so mad,” she blurts out before she can even think about it, and then claps a hand over her mouth in shock, tears rising in her eyes.

“Tory?” Ben says uncertainly. “Are you-”

“That wasn’t-”

“That wasn’t you.”

“That’s what he would have said,” she whispers. “It just came out. I wasn’t even thinking about it.”

Ben’s horrified expression says it all.

Tory leans forward, hand still over her mouth. She feels sick. It was her speaking, but not her words. She can’t distinguish whether Hi spoke through her or whether it was simply what he would have said and the pieces that made him are now part of her, but she knows she had no control.

This is why she keeps her hand forcefully over her mouth even as Kit gets back into the car, face pale.

“Are you…” he starts, then seems to realise it’s a stupid question. “I’m so sorry, kids. Let’s get you to the hospital.”

I don’t like hospitals, Tory thinks to herself. Gramps died at the MUSC and the doctors were rude when I broke my wrist.

She feels an ache at the memory of losing this man who was not even her grandfather, and she throws up into the plastic bag at her feet.

-

At the hospital, they look for Shelton.

They know that Hi will be somewhere here too, in the morgue waiting for his parents to come, waiting for an autopsy that will confirm what they already know.

She tries not to think about him there. He’s not there, not really. She felt him leave his body before he hit the ground.

It’s only now, sitting in an uncomfortable plastic chair in a waiting room to talk to a trauma specialist, that she breaks.

It’s been easy to avoid up to now, in the shock and the dark, but Hiram is dead. He’s dead because of what she did, and what Ben did, and she’s never going to see him again.

If he is in her brain, he offers no reassurance. Maybe he’s mad at her. He deserves to be.

Shelton finds them within the hour. There’s blood on his sleeves and knees from where he had knelt at Hi’s side, tried to save him and got nothing in return.

“Was it worth it?” Shelton asks. “Was it worth everything you were trying to do?”

“No!” Ben looks appalled. “Shelton, no. I- I would do anything, if I could just go back in time-”

“You can’t.” Shelton’s voice is shaking. “I can’t forgive you for this. Either of you.”

He’s shaking like a leaf. When he reaches up to rub his chin, an unconscious gesture that she’s seen a thousand times, but never on Shelton, she knows without even having to ask, but she asks anyway.

“He’s in your head, isn’t he?”

Shelton nods tightly, eyes welling up.

“I don’t know how to feel,” he says hoarsely. “He’s gone. But he’s not.”

“What’s in your head?” Ben asks.

“A lot,” Shelton says shakily. “Weird, random memories. And I really want to see his stupid fucking cat.”

He sinks down into the seat between them and buries his head in his hands.

“What are we going to do?” he whispers. “What the hell are we gonna do?”

Tory realises, watching him cry, that she suddenly desperately wants to make a joke. Her brain is scrambling to think of something funny to say even before she thinks that this isn’t like her at all, that she would never joke in this moment.

She just doesn’t want to see them cry. She can’t bear it. All of a sudden, she’d rather drink poison than see them cry.

It’s not her.

She pushes that thought back as hard as she can, feels it fade and disintegrate in her mind, and wonders if she’s killed him again, if she’s killing him every time she represses him.

Their parents come to find them soon after. They’re all sobbing, holding their children close and exclaiming that they can’t believe it.

Ruth and Linus aren’t there. Tory misses them like her heart has been ripped out.

When they finally let everyone go home, she nearly walks up the path to Hi’s house before her own. She sees Ben and Shelton make the same mistake.

That night, Tory cries herself to sleep and keeps her lamp on, because suddenly she’s afraid of the dark.