31_days | [2-Mar-2007] [Hellsing] Shatter

Title: Shatter
Day/Theme: March 2: leave the lies ill-concealed and the wounds never healed and the games not worth winning
Series: Hellsing
Characters: Anderson & Maxwell
Rating: PG-13

Blood dribbles down his face. He feels it, and it frightens him than he doesn’t feel the wounds. He sees something above him, jagged, blood-soaked objects, and he tries with some desperation not to guess at what they are. He can hear shattering glass, but it’s faint, like a memory, and all he can see is that one silver bayonet imbedded deep within the barrier that protected him.

Anderson has always been that way. Maxwell protects himself, and Anderson tears it away, and he puts up another barrier, one so smeared with dried blood it’s hard to maintain. They so often lie about these things, but both of them know so well what they’re doing. Hurting each other, in ways only people who love one another can.

It’s a game, but neither enjoy it, and neither stop. Until now.

He feels himself sliding down and he realizes that they’re inside him, through him, and he gasps with a kind of primal fear that one can only feel during death. He tries to reach out, his hand is bloody, but he finds nothing to hold onto. There’s only an empty sky and the smell of decay and smoke.

Cold. It’s all so cold. Warm hands settle on his hair, and when he sees Anderson’s face he tries to choke out a word, but he can’t feel anything else but the cold. He thinks he’s crying, his vision is bleary, but he knows he may just be going to sleep. He fights it hard, so hard, and tries to plea with the man holding him.

Help.

It’s foolish. He can’t, Maxwell knows he can’t. But he tries to ask anyway, tries to move his trembling lips to for words, but he can’t breathe and it hurts to try.

Don’t let me go to hell. Please.

Anderson pulls him closer, and the motion sends a sharp stab of pain through the cold. He’s pressed against a chest that’s warm, and he feels the rough stubble of Anderson’s neck against his temple. He doesn’t speak words of comfort, although Maxwell wishes he would.

The sound of shattering glass again. Maxwell hears something, words, but they don’t reach him. He feels pain, so much pain, like all of his senses are returning to him for those everlasting moments before he knows he’ll go to sleep. He tries to struggle, but his body isn’t moving, and his vision turns to black.

He hears the shattering sound one last time, and then he sinks into a darkness, and continues to fall. The warmth is gone, and he is left alone.