Mercy

By: TheeMizKitty

Disclaimer: I don't own Shutter Island or affiliated characters.

Warning: Vague slash between Laeddis and Sheehan.

A/N: If you want randomness, go ahead and read this story. Inspired by the History channel show I was watching, Gates of Hell. Okay, well, not really inspired by it, but it was on while I was typing this. Fitting though, no? XD

There is mercy, he thinks, but it will not help him in the end. It cannot exist for him, and he knows why. He is a killer, a murderer, the cause of his wife's death and his children's death. An entire family, murdered. Why isn't the husband lying in a grave next to him?

He knows that a part of him is, but that part is not enough. It can never be enough when his mind starts to waver and the details grow fuzzy, smeared blood on the walls, condensation on the steel bars, so many bars all around him in a perfect circle, a perfect cage. But it is a cage of his own making and to destroy it? It would take destroying himself.

If only it were so simple.

He is like a ghost, like the air he breathes and exhales, never the same yet always, always there to sustain him. Even when he does not know his own name, the familiar face is there, smiling at him and frowning at him and saying over and over again names and dates and situations that he cannot comprehend and doesn't want to. So long as he sees that face there is some semblance of mercy, somewhere, in the tatters that is all that is his heart and as undeserving as it is, he clings to it. Clings to him.

Doctor, friend, partner, enemy, leader, follower, and something else, in the solitude of the cell when the lights are all off and he is curled up in his cot, dreaming of bones and dust and ash and wicked twisted fences and his wife's face twisted just like them, among them, all around them. There is something else when he is on the cusp of something great, when he is tangled in the starch white sheets with a name on his tongue, curling it and yanking at it and twisting.

It begins with a D.

Deranged?

Demented?

Damaged?

Damned?

So many words start with the letter D, and are any of them good?

Mercy, he cries, as red stains his hands. Mercy for her, for them, for the things he doesn't know and can't know but he does he does he does he does—

A breath, a hot hand, a familiar presence that draws him back and sucks him in, pulls him from the whirlpool the night is drowning him in, his mind is flushing him in, and pulls him to safety.

Or is safety just another form of suffering?

When he holds him, he doesn't know. When chapped lips that taste like stale cigarettes meet his own, he goes rigid and then limp, just like a body, the body he wants to be somewhere but can't be, not when a burning tongue is next to his and breath that is not his own fills his lungs. Not when his arms raise, as though connected to manacles and lock around the solid body, solid and hold on as tight as they dare which is so fragile—

And he hears that familiar voice, through the ringing in his ears say things to him that he knows but can't understand.

Andrew you came back to me. God I missed you. God I missed you. But this is for the both of us. This is for the greater good, alright?

Then there is a pain in his neck, warmth in his veins like Dolores' embrace and Lester Sheehan's mouth and then white and white and white.

It's to help you, I promise. Alright?

As though he can answer, as though he can hear. Blind, deaf and dumb he is laid on the small cot and made to be still and silent and quiet and at peace.

There is mercy, he knows, but it will only destroy him in the end.

The greater good means different things to different people, doesn't it Andrew Laeddis?

Gah, over. Care to share?