I don't own it. I didn't make it. I have nothing to do with it's conception and am in no way affiliated with it.
Find Your Sister. Find The Saints.
There are a lot of things that go through your head in the moments before you die. Your loves, your regrets, your happiest memories. The baseball game you and your brother went to. The time you got lost in the woods on purpose. The smell of your mother's hand lotion when she'd hold you tight in a hug. Losing your virginity to a boy named Scott.
God damn, had that been a mistake.
The day you fell in love. Did you leave the iron on?
At least, that was what Elizabeth had always heard. It was what happened in the movies, right?
So the fact that Elizabeth Connolly was on her knees, staring down the barrel of a gun, her heart pounding in her chest and her ears strangely deaf, and the fact that nothing – not a single thought of any kind – flashed through her mind... well, that was probably a good sign. And Elizabeth?
She could use some good karma at that moment. That she didn't believe in silly little things like god or karma, or even that the Red Sox would win the game later that day, and that even if she did, it wasn't like Elizabeth had ever really done anything in her entire life to tip the scale of the universe in her favor in her supposed final few moments, did not enter into the equation.
Because they simply didn't have the time to. "I'll give you one more chance." Elizabeth inwardly shuddered at the sound of the voice that boomed down at her. She looked up at it's owner shakily, knowing the words that were coming. Words that could have potentially meant her freedom, but that probably weren't going to make a difference anyway. She had reached the end of her life. She ought to make peace with that. "Tell me where the money is." she was commanded.
The money... Elizabeth could have laughed. Right there, in the face of the man ready to take her life. She could have opened her mouth and laughed. A deep, crazed laugh from the very core of whatever soul she had left. It always came back to money, didn't it? Not that Elizabeth didn't like money. She loved money.
She loved the heavy smell that got stuck in your nostrils when you breathed it in. She loved the feel of cash stuffed in her bra for safe keeping. She loved the wrinkled faces on every bill, how they changed little details every year or two to make it harder to counterfeit. She loved the massive wad of cash stuffed in the bed pillow in her apartment – the one that the complete fucking moron with the gun in her face had just burned to the ground.
Oh, Elizabeth loved money with every fiber of her being. It was just that she no longer had any.
Though, if were honest with herself – and if she was going to die, then why the fuck not – then she wouldn't have given them the money anyway. Besides, thugs were greedy.
They should learn to enjoy the finer things in life, like flying a kite or having wild sex in a field on a moonlit night. She briefly considered suggesting it to him. Hey, she thought, do you really want to kill me? Wouldn't you rather be doing something fun and constructive with your time? Finding the secrets to the universe.
Maybe having a nice picnic? "I don't have the money." she replied, skipping the parts on the finer points in life and cutting to the chase. This gun to the head thing was getting old, anyway. She had better things she could be doing.
She wondered if there was baseball in hell.
The phone call came early in the afternoon. The sun was shining, there was an icy breeze brushing the trees outside, and as usual, Scarlett was sharing a bed with a warm body whose name she didn't remember. She groaned and rolled over, her face meeting the bare chest of said nameless man, and she warily wondered what the time was and how anyone could be enough of an asshole to actually try and call her at such an ungodly hour.
Some people were just so rude.
She sighed and let the phone ring, her arms coming to wrap themselves around the well defined abs she'd claimed as her pillow. It was too early to take phone calls, she blearily thought to herself. Let the fuckers leave a message. If they weren't boring, she'd surely be able to get back to them later.
If she managed to find the time with that warm body beside her... "Good morning." She smiled, glancing up at a face she was happy to find she actually recognized. She made a mental note to lay off her usual celebratory vodka from now on, knowing she'd been making that note since her first year in high school and that she'd consistently ignored it ever since.
"Good morning to you." she replied, rubbing her body against the one beside her as she pulled herself up. Bright blue eyes belonging to a man named Anthony Meyers who had, until her job officially ended yesterday afternoon, been her client in yet another sleazy dirty photos case, grazed over her sheet clad body before coming to rest on her face.
"How did you sleep?" Anthony asked as he rubbed her bare back with his hand. It made Scarlett want to laugh.
"Sleep?" she asked with a sidewise grin. "Did we sleep? I must have missed that. I spent the night giving myself an excuse to buy a new bed." Anthony laughed. Scarlett pushed herself up, propping herself on her elbows for a moment as she climbed on top of him, straddling his hips. "You weren't off with another woman, were you?"
"Me? With another woman?" Anthony replied, feigning shock at her question. "You know there's only you."And that, in a nutshell, was why Scarlett hated cases with married couples.
Hell, why she hated married couples in general. Everyone's a liar and everyone betrays everyone else. Especially Scarlett. She already knew that with a certainty.
Quiet music played from a pair of battered speakers across the room, sounding broken and fragmented and, Scarlett thought to herself with a thrust of her hips, beautifully frayed to her ears. The phone rang again, followed by a clicking sound as the messaging system picked up. "...Miss Evans? This is Dr. Peretti at Boston Memorial. I'm calling about a Martin Winslowe--"
Scarlett immediately forgot what she'd been doing and rolled over, reaching for the phone from her bedside table. "This had better be goddamned fucking important." she growled. She scratched her head, causing her platinum blond hair to fall in her eyes, and waited for the person on the other end of the line to recover from her less than chipper greeting.
"Miss Evans?" the voice asked. "Miss Scarlett Evans?"
"Yes." she growled impatiently. "What?" There was another moment of silence.
"Do you know a man named Martin Winslowe?" Scarlett sighed and fell back down in the bed. It was a name she hadn't heard in a long time. Or maybe it was just a name she'd been pretending not to hear every day for the past seven years. Either way, it'd just come back to haunt her, just as it always did.
Just as she always knew it would. "Miss Evans?"
"No." Scarlett replied vehemently. Then, "He's my father." There were many thoughts that followed those words, but like most things with Scarlett, they never managed to escape her lips. "What's going on?"
"Your father was admitted to the hospital last night after he was attacked." Scarlett laughed into the phone. She couldn't help herself. Her father? Attacked?
What a joke. "Is he alright?" Scarlett asked. The other line was quiet, obviously put off by Scarlett's manner. Well, good, Scarlett thought.
"It's not good." the person said slowly. "He hasn't got very long. You might want to get down here as quickly as you can." The words took a moment to sink in. Scarlett had never heard such impossible words in her life.
And she worked part time for a tabloid that specialized in alien love children and the end of the world. "I'm coming." she resigned, hanging up the phone. She stared down at her hand, still clutching the phone, her eyes tracing the outlines of her fingers stoically as she tried to resolve the familiarly unfamiliar churning in her gut.
Something was going on. Something big and something bad.
Sighing, she slid off the bed, letting the sheet fall to the ground as she scanned the floor for her discarded clothes. Anthony watched her curiously, frowning. "What's going on?" he asked, sounding worried. Scarlett didn't pause to look at him as she slid on her panties and reached for her jeans.
"I have to go." Scarlett told him. She pulled on her jeans and grabbed a t-shirt from the pile of clothes in the corner. "You can let yourself out and mail me a check."
She didn't bother looking back as she grabbed her coat and walked out of her bedroom, making sure to stuff her keys in her coat pocket as she left and slammed her front door behind her. She stuffed her hands in her pockets as the cool wind blew against her, blowing her hair from her shoulders with every step she took toward the hospital. It was a short walk from her apartment.
Did she know Martin Winslowe, the doctor had asked. Did she knew him? Scarlett doubted anyone could claim to know Martin Winslowe. Her mother certainly hadn't. Scarlett had spent most, if not her entire life, wishing that she'd never heard or spoken the name of Martin Winslowe once.
And so Martin Winslowe was a mystery, but the greater mystery to Scarlett Evans was why she should care. Just because she was related to him, that didn't make him part of her life. Just because he'd been there for most of her childhood, that didn't mean that he'd cared for her. Besides, there was more to being there than to simply be there.
Scarlett paused, laughing to herself. She was beginning to sound like her old shrink.
That had certainly been a mistake.
Scarlett pressed on, crossing a street. It wasn't far now. She could feel her heart beating angrily with her every step, the past she'd been pretending had never happened coming dangerously close to colliding with her present. What was she doing? It wasn't as though she owed him anything. She shouldn't be there, she thought. She shouldn't rush to see him. Her stomach shouldn't flutter nervously at the idea of crossing the street to the main hospital building. She shouldn't care if he lived or died as she asked the woman behind the counter where he was. She shouldn't count every step as though it might be her last as she walked down the hallway toward the elevator.
She felt her heart grow cold as the doors closed and she pressed the button for the second floor. Her feet were like lead when the doors opened up, a new hallway in view, waiting to be traversed to her father's door. To his dying bedside.
Did she have it in her to face this?
It was a useless, unanswered question. The universe ignored it. Scarlett stepped out of the elevator, her feet finding their own way down the hall, moving her this way and that to avoid nurses and patients, crying loved ones waiting in chairs.
The lost ones who were always left behind.
She found the room easily enough. The door was closed most of the way and the curtain inside was drawn. Scarlett found herself making her way inside, curtains and door pushed from her mind as she laid eyes on a face much older than she remembered. So beaten and weathered, she thought to herself, she wasn't sure it was recognizable at all. She wasn't sure it could even have belonged to same man she'd known.
Maybe she'd gone down the wrong hallway, she thought for a moment. Maybe she was in the wrong room. Maybe she'd gotten the wrong floor.
But Scarlett knew that she hadn't. She knew that she was in the right place, for once in her sorry life. Whatever else she'd gotten wrong over the years, this was one of the few moments when she'd gotten things right. She was in the right hospital. She'd found the right hallway, on the right floor, and this was her father's room.
She stared for a long moment, unable to help herself. She felt the air grow thinner, her heart beating too rapidly for her lungs to accept the air. "Daddy..."
The word had been unspoken for so long, it was no longer familiar to her lips. Her mouth worked strangely, the sound oddly wrong to her ears, as her whisper hung in the air like smoke. One weary, glazed over eye blinked open, it's owner turning their head slowly through the narcotic induced state to stare at her. They were eyes Scarlett remembered so well, she had stared into them so often as a child.
But even they seemed distant. Even they seemed unfamiliar and wrong. Was it just time that had done this? Or was it the wound that had finally caused her father to meet with his fate? "Scar..." he said. Scarlett felt her heart go numb. She welcomed it. "You look just like your mother."
"What happened?" Scarlett asked, though she was sure she'd be better off not knowing. Keep your worlds separate, Scarlett scolded herself. He'd done it so well, accepted that distance for the both of them so easily. She could surely manage the same.
"I think..." Martin began, pausing awkwardly to cough and take a new breath. "I think I've finally met my end." His eyes closed, as if something in sleep was calling to him, then he looked at her again. "I tried hard, this time. I really did. If you only knew, Scar..." Scarlett frowned, refusing to acknowledge that something like tears behind her eyes.
"Knew what?" Scarlett prompted. He gave her a confused look.
"You have to find them, Scar." he whispered, his distant voice taking on a new strength. "You have to fix it." The beeping of the heart monitor was growing slow and faint, raising the alarm in Scarlett's voice when he closed his eyes.
"Fix what?" Scarlett asked, her voice sounding almost frantic. "Find who, Daddy? Find who?" She touched his arm lightly.
"Find your sister." he whispered through the gravel in his throat. "Find the Saints..."
The beeping on the monitor stopped and the loud bleating of a dead heart filled Scarlett's ears as a sleep that was final and endless beckoned the man she'd once known, or thought she knew, from her presence. A nurse came in, glancing at her uncertainly as she examined him.
They were the last words Martin Winslowe would ever say to anyone, and he had said them to her.
Find your sister, he'd said. Find the Saints.
…..what in god's name did that mean?
A/N: Okay, so I'm a little nervous about posting this. It's my first actual posted fic in.... ages and ages and ages. But I'm hoping someone will read it and maybe like it, though honestly I love my characters for this one, so I'm not sure that would really make much of a difference. The rating's not bad for this one, though it may go up. I'll figure that out when I get there. And don't worry, there's more coming really soon. I have pages and pages of notes for this story.
And remember, if you read it, take the time to review. I'll do the same.