Rebirth – Chapter 1: My Sin

Note from Author: Ugh. I won't lie to you. I might never finish this. I'm just trying so hard to get through my writer's block right now.

Warnings: Sex, violence, angst, homosexual themes.

Explanation: You know, despite what some people say, I don't write guy/guy relationships just for the fucking hell of it. I watched the movie, I said, hey, it's not a big leap. I saw the relationship, and that's what made it believable to me. Don't like it? Whatever. Don't believe me? Fine. Judge me if you want, but I honestly don't know why you would waste your time.

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There is no greater fear on earth than powerlessness.

Maybe that bastard had been a little right. Maybe, as right as a sociopath could be. As a doctor, Lawrence had let the film of his own excellence cover his eyes and convince him of his invincibility, willingly, welcomingly so. It wasn't as though he didn't notice this before. It wasn't that earth-shocking revelation that sent men whirling into their own madness for the sheer disbelief of how they could have missed it. …It was just that he had never thought of it as ignorant before. But it was. Ignorant. Useless and ignorant. That illusion of omnipotence left him with nothing but the ideal that he no longer had to try. After all, struggling mounted up to so much nothing in the end. Man was not made to struggle for survival, because he was too fucking weak. So instead he created a world in which he did not have to.

But that world…was outside. Where the fuck am I? Was naturally the first question one comes upon in this type of situation. The mere thought of being somewhere you didn't recognize was terrifying enough. He thought about security, what it was and what it meant. Security was a false pretense. Every man tricks himself into thinking that he's safe. That he can get out of any dilemma. If you didn't know where you were, you asked someone. You used a phone, you looked for street signs, you found a gas station. Lawrence could not only do none of those things at the moment, but he was also dying. Lost, helpless, and dying. He couldn't stand, couldn't walk, couldn't cry out for help, and if he had—no one would have heard him. He was powerless. Once he held his life easily in the palm of his hand…now it was smeared out mercilessly over the floor around him.

His crawl was slowing, little by little. But though the acid in his muscles burned and the nausea and bloodloss were weighing him down, he refused to give in yet. He needed help. Adam needed help. He had to get him out of there. He made a promise. Even when the world was spinning and he couldn't see where he was going, even if there could very well be no one for miles, and even knowing from medical experience that he had about twenty to thirty minutes before he bled to death, that notion prevailed. He made a promise. And if he didn't make it out, Adam would be trapped in there forever. Wherever the hell there was. Wherever the hell they were. So he kept pushing, kept dragging himself onward, kept telling himself that he had to be close to something. Closer to a door than death, he hoped.

"Don't leave me! Please…"

Adam's desperate plea. If there was anything worse than such a situation, it was being in such a situation by yourself. Yes, they needed each other. Each was the only thing keeping the other in his right mind. The only thing telling the other that this was real, and someone else knew that it was just as fucked up as he thought. More importantly, they needed each other to survive. Lawrence needed to shoot him. He needed to wound him like that in order to ensure he could get out of there. And likewise, Adam needed him now more than ever. And Adam hadn't let him down—so neither would he. His arms just needed to stop gaining weight.

But in the dying haze of his body, where the pain was truly beginning to fade and his movement urged to cease completely…there were voices. In the flickering darkness around him, a light, chiming echo from the walls tapped gently into his head. However, he didn't recognize it at first. Death stood firmly mantling him with greedy hands covering his ears and blotting out his vision with its cloak. It grew just a little louder. Barely at all. But enough. His eyes began to open, surprised at how they had ever closed, and he pushed himself further with a true scraping of the ends of his engery. At last he could go no more. He was eventually sprawled out on his stomach, mulling over the fact that tears were leaking from him without restraint and trying to discover the source of those voices, not that he could move to them.

…Poor old Lawrence. Brilliant surgeon. Devoted husband and father. Good friend.

Headline.

Man bleeds to death after severing own foot.

Oh, and it only could get better from there. Esteemed surgeon caught in scandalous affair with intern. Wife and daughter found dead in home. Shit…Yes. Dying here would give him a drab obituary to say the least. It would call him a pervert. A heartless bastard. So he'd never been the greatest man. Not the most caring father or the most loving husband. But oh God…was this what he deserved? He loved his daughter…he'd saved the lives of so many. And still…still, he was marked as this inherently evil being?

He slowly rested his head down against the wet, grimey floor, strings of mucus dripping from his lips. He made only one final prayer to the unforgiving loom of his surroundings as he realized that there was no way to move. It was one simple word. The hardest thing in the world to ask for because everyone was too selfish, too far away, or too oblivious to give. The one thing he had never admitted he needed. "…Help…" and another sob wrenched his throat. But he no longer felt pain.

And the voices were getting louder. Almost…almost as if by some miraculous, ridiculous chance, his barely whispered cry had been heard by someone. And he could hear footsteps along with them. Booming and pounding on the floor enough to make his head ache. And down the dark hall, they were coming…towards him. The next moments were a complete blur to him. Shouting, clammoring, so many footsteps, crackling buzzes, the whole of the world coming crashing down onto his head for one breif instant. It was in the next second that his consciousness, dangling from a tenuous thread, snapped to attention upon the contact of some foreign hand touching him.

All of the pain in his body was rekindled in a massive explosion that tore a strangled gasp from his chest. The kind of raw, burning fire that ate you alive from the inside out and let every nerve in your being sing your agony in one, cantankerous, ethereal roar. The pain grasped him by the throat, squeezing mercilessly, growling, spitting, screeching into his face you are ALIVE.

"Stay down!" the voice insisted over the yelling around him. A man with a gun was crouched above him. "It's gonna be fine! We've got you now!" he turned up over a shoulder and belted out an order. "Get the paramedics now! Someone's down here!"

Had he made it…?

The man was shaking him lightly by the shoulder. "Hey pal, you stay awake, you hang in there! We're getting you the hell outta here!"

"Inh…" he managed through the cripple of pain and the wave of tears spilling over his cheeks as he forced his eyes to stay open.

"Jesus…" the large man above him paused. "D-D.r…Gordon?" It was a voice he didin't recognize.

"A-Adam…" he roused his crumbling voice enough, small and pathetic as he fought back the sobs. "Please find Adam…"

"Don't worry. Just relax. It's all okay now." The gruff voice was strange to hear in a soothing tone as the man hardened his grip on Lawrence's shoulder. "Stay with me."

"You've got to find him…He's chained to the wall…help him…I promised him I would find someone…" He hurt too badly now. He felt sick. Like he was going to vomit.

"Gordon?" fading out. "Gordon!"

And then there was blackness, and sirens, and…nothing…