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Every time Nolan closes his eyes, it’s all he can see, all he can hear.
The hospital, the loud gunshots—he never did get used to the casual, brutal type of violence that Monroe’s group—i.e. cult—seemed to have no difficulty portraying.
He remembers clearly his hands, still shaking even as he crouches out of the line of fire. He doesn’t remember a time when he wasn’t shaking. Then, the sudden decisiveness that comes over him, and maybe it’s out of a desire to prove himself, maybe it’s because he finally can do something right, maybe he just wants the shooter to stop and knows that he’s the best choice of all of them to do it, maybe it’s adrenaline and he just isn’t processing the danger or fear, all overloaded in his head, or maybe he’s driven by a volatile cocktail of fear and protectiveness—whether it’s for Liam or Gabe or even himself, though he doubts it, he’ll never know. Whatever it is, he and Melissa exchange nods and Nolan feels like he’ll always remember the next sequence in terrifying detail. He can still feel the weight of the fire extinguisher and the ease with which it knocks the shooter out, can still gauge the (probably too heavy) amount of force he puts behind the blow.
He remembers feeling oddly steady with that one action he takes for himself, like he’s under his own power and he’s got some sort of control, the feeling he’s been grasping for since the beginning. He can still feel the fear but it isn’t paralyzing or making his hands tremor and it feels like he’s done something right.
But Nolan also remembers the moment before looking up and that creeping feeling of knowing deep in his bones that it doesn’t even matter because he is too fucking late, even before he locks eyes with his (former?) friend because he remembers looking up and Gabe’s face will never fade from his memory, not looking like this. His expression is burned into Nolan’s eyelids and seared into his brain, smeared over anything and everything that reminds him of Gabe.
Gabe’s face, and the blood that sprays from his chest and splatters the floor, and how he just falls. Gabe’s face, young and open and just so afraid, because he’s always just been afraid, and this has always just been about fear. Gabe’s face, and his chest as he falls to the floor and the way Nolan cannot tear his eyes away from the amount of bullets that have torn through him.
Nolan cannot stop seeing Gabe as he falls, starting over in an infinite static loop every time he closes his eyes.
There are five bullets in his chest before Nolan knocks the guy, the nameless hunter, out. Five shots and a disproportionate amount of blood, and Nolan knows Gabe is gone, even before he hits the ground.
But—
His face.
His chest.
Nolan knows him. They were on the lacrosse team together. Gabe backed him, was at his side when Nolan started this entire fucking mess, and now they’re on opposite sides and now he’s lying on the ground with blood slicking the tile and now Nolan is still standing upright, bullet-free.
Blood—
Nolan almost feels like there should be more of it, like it should be pooling around him, but it doesn’t. It soaks his shirt and seeps through his jacket and onto his hands and doesn’t seem like enough for five bullets through the chest.
And—Nolan knows his chest, knows his arms and his hands and his mouth and his eyes. Intimately aware of the damage they can cause and the devotion he has had within him. They changed next to each other, Phys. Ed. and lacrosse, for close to three years. Nolan knows him. And everything he’s ever taken in tells him no, this isn’t right. Gabe doesn’t look like that. He doesn’t talk like that. Not unrelenting and cruel and enjoying the pain he’s causing. He’s strong and protective and emotional and he’s a bitch and his chest is a stupidly thick wall of muscle and he—
He doesn’t stumble, or trip, or fall, or whimper. He doesn’t quiver or spill blood. Nolan doesn’t know if he’s ever seen Gabe hurt, not like this—lacrosse can be brutal, but it is never like this, nothing is ever like this—and maybe that’s why he’s subconciously been invincible in Nolan’s mind. Or maybe you just don’t think things like this will ever happen to you. Maybe it’s always going to be impossible to prepare seriously for this possibility. Maybe this is supposed to teach Nolan a lesson of control, of self fulfilling prophecies, of the fact that life doesn’t always have to be a game of kill or be killed but if you treat it like that, it will be.
Muscle, sinew, tissue. His still beating heart and rapid breaths. Gabe’s always been good at controlling himself, so it’s off putting entirely that right now then he isn’t.
Blood—
Blood, blood, blood. Nolan’s heart pounds a tattoo against his ribs, feeling at the same way too fast and like he can take an entire breath in and out between beats.
The bright, rust-color skid doesn’t seem like enough for what happened but far too much in a way that makes Nolan want to stuff his fingers down his throat and pull out the nausea in his stomach. Wants to drag it out in strings like the way Gabe’s blood came out of his mouth seconds before and Nolan’s out of his own not hours ago until he vomits every last bit of the horror out.
Nolan can’t stop thinking about it. It creeps up on him when he’s awake, when he closes his eyes, when he's alone, which is far too often nowadays. He can’t stop thinking that he wouldn’t be alone if Gabe hadn't fucking died.
If Nolan hadn’t gotten him killed.
If he hadn’t gotten himself killed.
Still, it’s trapped in Nolan’s head, and as much as it’s slowly killing him he’s not sure he wants to forget. Not sure if he should. Not sure he deserves that mercy.
Because even though Gabe beat him unconscious not an hour before that death-wrought-destined moment, Nolan can’t feel anything but a deep devastation hiding in his numbness. Maybe he was delirious, but the moment after Gabe stood up—knuckles covered in Nolan’s blood this time, and it feels like a shitty parallel when he thinks about it, a really shitty foreshadowing—right before he smiled (and Nolan still can barely believe he smiled after that, can barely recognize this Gabe from the one who had his back both on the field and off it only weeks ago) he looked remorseful. Nolan clings to this, probably an unhealthy amount, but he has to believe it or he thinks he’ll go insane. Nolan knows Gabe took no pleasure in it while it was happening—because he couldn’t’ve, could he? No—he knows firsthand how much Monroe can get into your head and make you do things you never would have done otherwise.
The first sign, Nolan thinks, because he’s been pouring over the events of the last few weeks almost obsessively, had to have been early. But by the time Nolan noticed anything, or admitted to himself that there was something to notice, it was already far too late. The locker room; Gabe shooting up a house to keep him safe and Nolan realizing he’s right. Nolan isn’t cut out for this and he should’ve fucking realized that before Gabe had to do this and rationalize it for himself and have Monroe worm his way into the soft bit of his defence that Nolan is. Nolan is the reason Gabe did this—it is his fault Scott’s friends and family are hurt but it is also his fault that Gabe thought he had too and his fault that Gabe is probably far too ruined to go back to who he was. To a bitchy, asshole teenager, sure, but not a fucking murderer. It’s his fault that Gabe is going further to Monroe, all because Nolan didn’t have the guts to finish what he started.
And it’s Nolan’s fault that he’s here at all. It was Nolan’s idea first, his fucking fear and his fucking choice to get in way over his head. Gabe was only ever there because of Nolan, no matter how much Monroe twisted him into this person Nolan can’t recognize. Gabe only had to do this because Nolan couldn’t and even though he’s not sure it’s a bad thing he couldn’t, he does know that everything that’s happened is his fault anyways. Monroe and her bloody hands that she passed on to everyone around her like some sick initiation and Gabe choosing to try to keep her from noticing Nolan’s clean ones by coating his thicker.
Bloody hands—
Blood—
Blood in a horrifying smear on the tiled floor, but streaked across it in such a terribly neat way; even, rectangular marks from where Gabe has been dragging himself to the wall. Is he trying to get away from them? Away from the shooter? Just propping himself up so he can be on slightly less of a disadvantage? In his bullet riddled state, does he even know that he’s not under attack anymore?
Why did he do it? Nolan doesn’t know, except he does, he does, he does. Gabe did it for him as much or maybe more than he did it because he was really for the cause. He didn’t know anything at the beginning, not really, now that he thinks about it. Gabe had gone with him, barely any questions asked, because saying he didn’t ask anything would be an insult to both their intelligences. But he had gone because Nolan asked and Nolan knows why, even if he is avoiding that thought like the plague. He’ll reexamine it at a later point, hopefully when he has the time and feels less like he’ll hurt someone else or himself when he does. It’s complicated, except it’s not. He doesn’t want to think about it.
Nolan can’t stop seeing—hearing, in vivid technicolor surround sound 4 fucking K—the helpless sort of way the blood comes out of his mouth in globs and strands of saliva, and the way Gabe’s chest convulses. His rattling and gasping breaths and the way his ribcage heaves in quick bursts. The slight buzzing of the flickering lights and the terrible smell of the otherwise sterile hospital mixing with their sweat and decay and of course the overwhelming, cloying, copper smell of blood.
Nolan doesn’t want to get closer. He aches for Gabe’s reassuring presence—always surrounding, protecting but somehow always edged, always keeping Nolan unsure and offbalance of how their interaction would go—in a way that sickens him and his stomach hurts and he wants to go back in time. He doesn’t want Gabe to see him so firmly on the wrong side he’s against that he’s dying for and because of. But he wants to walk forward and he is repulsed by the scene and like always, old reliable always in the wost time it could, his indecision paralyzes him. He stands, and he can feel something in him begin to twitch again. He doesn't want to know what his face looks like, because he knows it’s something he doesn’t want. That crazed-edge of a not-quite-smile. He longs for Gabe and wants to hold his hand and make this all go away but his fears paralyze him the way they always have and the moment for his action passes.
But Gabe’s voice haunts him too, echoes in his mind whenever he gets a moment to himself and even in the times when he doesn’t. Just that hoarse, gasping, panting voice that Nolan knows is more of a reaction than anything, Gabe trying so hard not to focus on the five fucking bullet wounds in his chest by saying something, anything, anything to distract himself, to manifest it outside his body like maybe that will make it go away faster. Nolan can’t begrudge him for it, because it still feels kind of like his fault. Because maybe if he was faster—
It feels deserved that any time Nolan takes a breath all he hears is it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts in that panting sort of desperate way.
Theo, he thinks, kneeling in front of Gabe’s slumped form—
Gabe relaxing and his eyes difting away from the world around him and he says it doesn’t hurt and—
It doesn’t hurt. His eyes flutter closed.
Nolan takes the pain instead