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It feels as though it’s always raining when the evenings of these meetings roll around. Lawrence knows that rain is common during this part of the year, where the temperature is just barely too warm for snow to make it to the ground as flakes, but the probability of him having to brush rain droplets from the wool of his coat every time he steps across the threshold of the church should be far lower than this.
It feels ominous, almost. He wonders if it’s possible that he brings the gloom with him every time that he deigns to come to these bimonthly assemblies. He wonders if the universe knows somehow. He wonders every time if the soles of his shoes are going to start smoking.
Survivors Anonymous reads the chalkboard on the far side of the circle of wooden chairs. Lawrence smirks at the irony, like he does every time, as he hooks his cane over the back of the chair nearest to him, and then drapes his coat over the back of it as well. Anonymous. How anonymous can one be, when their name and face is plastered across every publication in the country, when they get dogged by journalists and gossip rags for months and months after they resurface.
Does anyone else think about these things, as they’re sinking into their usual seats and avoiding the eyes of everyone else in the room? Or is it just Lawrence, avoiding the elephant like he always does, pretending like he’s only attending these meetings because he has to, and not because the communal empathy helps, just a bit?
He folds his arms over his chest, settling into his seat with the creak of the old wood under him, stretching out his leg until the smooth plastic of his prosthetic is visible from under the cuff of his pristinely pressed khakis.
The feeling of eyes on him is not a foreign one.
Lawrence snaps his eyes up sharply, and recoils just as sharply, the line of his spine snapping straight faster than he’d previously thought possible. Across the circle from him, a pair of green eyes lifts from his foot to his face, foreign and familiar all in one. It isn’t uncommon to recognize a newcomer before they’ve introduced themselves, but it is uncommon to recognize the face of a newcomer as one that he’d seen, bloody and ashen and desperate, as one that he knew to be cold and dead and rotting underground.
He has to bite down on the inside of his cheek to keep himself from pinching himself, just to see if he might be dreaming.
The meeting is called lazily to order, and Lawrence can’t find it in himself to tear his eyes away from this not-stranger stranger across from him, even as those eyes (those eyes, those eyes) turn away from him and towards the mediator standing in front of the blackboard. His voice sounds like fuzz and radio static to Lawrence, but when he stops speaking, those tired, purple-rimmed eyes sweep around the circle to look at everyone, and the corners of his flat slash of a mouth turn upward just slightly. Lawrence follows the curve of it, where angry-looking scars cut it even wider in his wan face.
“Uh, hey, everyone.” He speaks, and his voice carries an accent that Lawrence has heard before, but only under duress. “I’m David.”
“Hi, David,” says the circle around Lawrence, who is sitting as still as he would be if he was carved from marble.
There’s a chuckle, and Lawrence watches David’s hands fidget over and over and over each other. An expulsion of nervous energy, he’s sure. When he looks up again, he makes eye contact with Lawrence, and it lingers longer than is entirely comfortable.
Everything else is reduced to white noise. He can’t tune his brain in. He can’t focus. The rest of the meeting passes in a haze.
One of the major dilemmas when dealing with being an amputee but not quite being used to it yet is that one needs to completely relearn basic motor functions. One of the major dilemmas of having seen a ghost is the desperate need to get away from it the very second it’s socially acceptable to.
The handful of people that’d attended are making their way toward the door, or toward the card table tucked into the corner to pour themselves a cup of the hot black sludge that’s being passed off as coffee this week, if only to have something to cup between their hands to fight off the chill the rain has brought on.
Lawrence, unfortunately, is not able to amble away that quickly. Double unfortunately, his cane clatters to the ground when he pulls his coat from the back of the chair. He huffs out an aggravated sigh, but before he can lean to get it, there’s a hand reaching into his line of sight, a head of shaggy dark hair bobbing into view.
“Here,” says David, angling the grip of the cane toward Lawrence, and looking up at him with those wide, wide green eyes.
Lawrence gives him a tight smile as he reaches out to take it, but David doesn’t let go when he tugs.
“I know you,” David says next, and his face is neutral, but his gaze flays Lawrence, pins him open like a beetle on the board of a collector. “Gordon. Lawrence Gordon.” The accent reeks of North Jersey, and Lawrence finds himself wondering exactly why David had come into the city for something like this, and why now, when it’d been twice as long since his test as it had been since Lawrence’s.
“I’d appreciate it if you'd let go of my cane,” Lawrence replies, clipped and officious, so that he doesn’t say anything that might humiliate him.
“He was my brother, you know.” David doesn’t let go of the cane. Instead, he pulls on it, a steady and subtle pressure, and Lawrence doesn’t have time to process what he’s saying before he’s forced to grip the back of the chair just to remain upright. “Adam,” he continues, and the name hits Lawrence like he imagines a bullet to the shoulder might.
He levels his gaze at David and does his very best impression of cool, calm, and collected in the face of the crease in the center of David’s eyebrows, the set of his square jaw, and the familiarity of the misplaced anger.
“We buried an empty casket. My mom hasn’t been the same since.” He releases the grip he has on Lawrence’s cane, and a smirk curls his mouth up at one corner, elongated by the scar there in the eerie sort of way that almost makes Lawrence feel as though none of this is happening. “And you didn’t have to bury anything. Did you, Mister Gordon?”
“Doctor,” Lawrence corrects icily, shoulders squaring when all he gets back is a scoff. He wants to say that he’s sorry. He wants to tell David every single thing that Adam said to him in the eight hours they were trapped together. He wants to say that Adam had begged for his life under the guise of wanting to see his family again. Insanely, he wants to take him to that bathroom, to Adam’s grimy tomb, to let him grieve properly. Instead, he drapes his coat over his arm, and sets his jaw. “I’ll see you in two weeks.”
He turns, and beats a hasty retreat, and he can feel the blaze of David’s eyes on him the whole way across the room. When he glances back at the door, he’s just where Lawrence left him, eyes shining and wet, arms wound tightly around his torso, but still looking at Lawrence in a way that could whither plants.
Outside, the rain has stopped.