regrets collect like old friends. tune, day 5.

The first canon sounds.

Then a second. A third shortly after, and then finally, a fourth. Brody had only seen one of the bodies fall to match, though.

Andrew.

And it had been far quicker than he'd thought it would be. He'd just crumpled beneath Tex's spear like nothing. If he wasn't confident with a blade in his hand, he might be scared. If he wasn't completely filled with a red-hot, searing RAGE, he might give a shit. Others push past him, covered in blood and carrying their spoils of war. He waits for Alice for a moment, stepping over Andrew as Tex gathered up his things now. "This isn't over," he grumbles half-heartedly at him, rounding the nearest corner with his lantern raised and a threat lingering behind him.

December.

His eyes go a little wide, but a smirk tugs at the corner of his mouth. He's pleased by this, even if he'd wanted to do it himself. There had been something so damn killable about the little shit, but he wasn't going to lie, he might actually miss his steel gaze and one-word answers. "Alice?" He calls out and his voice echoes back to him a few seconds later. Shit. "Alice!" Pushing further in, he knocks past some girl fleeing and resists the urge to strangle her for slowing him down if but for only a second. "ALICE!!!" He calls out again, voice cracking as the echo comes back quicker this time and louder, almost deafening.

Alice.

She lays in a pool of her own blood on the cave floor. Fuck. It wasn't supposed to happen this way. Brody falls to his knees beside her and reaches out to push away the hair from her face. There's wounds all over her body, some old that he recognizes and some new that he knows are from today. From just now. Had it been her? The blood-stained face of the light-haired girl carrying a bunch of stuff as she'd bumped into him flashes in the front of his mind. He growls.

But first, he says goodbye.

"I'm sorry."

A single tear shed, no more. He reaches out and shuts her eyes, but as he goes to leave he notices she's missing things. The bracers they'd gotten. And the gloves they'd found. Her feet were without boots any longer and the axes he'd given to her were nowhere around. Brody turns back the way he came at a sprint, but he stops dead in his tracks as he watches the girl do just as he did but next to Andrew. She sobs, desperately calls out for the girl from Nine.

He pauses to relish in her suffering.

"You're too late," is all he offers her, though he imagines how it would feel to crush her windpipe with his bare hands. Easy. He wonders how it would feel to watch her take her last frantic breath. Satisfying. Right then and there, standing over her as she weeps for the boy in her arms, Brody decides he will be the one to kill her.

If it's the last thing he does.

"It was you, wasn't it?" He matches her pain and anguish with anger and fury. He bends and leans in close to the side of her face, but his voice isn't gentle. It's loud and harsh and filled to the brim with resentment.

"YOU FUCKING KILLED HER, DIDN'T YOU?"

Brody screams in her face but it doesn't make him feel any better. "She was good," he spits at her through gritted teeth, chest heaving as he fights away stupid, useless tears. "She was good." He laughs at her useless cries for help, at her plea for someone, anyone, to come save her and her already dead boyfriend.

He leans in again, nothing more than cruelty on his lips, hoping to turn his words in to a dagger to stab right into her rotten little heart. "I wish I had done it myself," his leather gloves squeak as he tightens his grip on the hilt of his sword. He wants to draw it so badly right now. To take her by surprise, slit that throat of hers, and bathe in her goddamn blood. If Brody is certain of only one thing, it's that Tune would deserve it. "At least his death was quick," he tenses, but then releases slowly.

Her life will be his before the week is done.

"Yours won't be."

That's a promise.

[ coding by griffin ]