The Personal Heights

[Brackie]

((Brendan Wallace continues from The Cavalry Arrives))

As soon as the nurse left the room and it looked like Jay was asleep, Brendan was on his feet. He grabbed his clothes and threw the hospital gown under his bed. A few painstaking minutes later he was in change of clothing number three. The only outfit he never wore on the island, the one he planned to wear back home, was now wrapped around his body, and that body was now heading out the door of the room.

He checked the corridors, no nurses or doctors or anyone. Good. Time to re-engage nightly ritual. Brendan held his sneakers in his hands and crept along the sleek shiny hospital floor in a pair of black socks in silence. The stairway was only a few doors down, luckily, but no risk should be taken when you're not supposed to be doing what you're doing.

There was only a few sets of stairs to the top of the building, where he'd gone every other night he could make it since he'd been well enough in the head to walk. He bound up the tile steps like his life depended on getting up there and seeing the fresh air. Every landing he'd stop. Sometimes he could swear he heard a sound, like a set of footsteps following him up the stairs. But as he hit the landing they stopped. Brendan parted it from his mind. Stairwells had a lot of echo, it was probably his own steps following him.

Finally he reached the roof, and like clockwork pulled out his wallet and the very same card used for this sort of thing ever since his youth. He gripped the door handle and inserted the laminate plastic into the crevice to the same familiar place. Just like he expected it to, the lock clicked, and Brendan pulled open the heavy door before grabbing the piece of wood he'd stuck beneath the gap in the doorway and the cement floor of the rooftop and inserting it into the newfound gap to keep it open.

He slipped his shoes on and strode through the doorway into the night air.

Sometimes, the Hospital garden just didn't do it. There was nothing that could keep him full inside like the night air, it was so familiar and such a feeling that you couldn't replicate. You weren't supposed to be on the roof, but Brendan didn't care. He needed this.

He strode towards the roof's edge and planted himself on the ledge he'd been accustomed to sitting on. There was so much of a risk of falling off and ending up on the sidewalk as though you never left the island. But that...

That wasn't much of a problem to him.

[JamesRenard†]

((Allen Birkman continued from Four-Act Structure))

Allen used to pride himself on being a deep sleeper, being able to snooze through loud noises when he was back home. Of course, that sometimes meant he slept right through his alarm clock and ended up being late for school on occasion. Whenever that happened, he'd panic and fret as if the world was going to end.

After what he'd been through... sleeping through an alarm didn't seem to matter that much anymore.

Now, he was lucky if he was able to get any sleep at all. Insomnia had struck and prevented the boy from catching some shut-eye, and on the rare occasion that he could drop off, the memories of the island haunted him and woke him back up in a cold sweat. So Allen just sat on a chair with his arms crossed, listening to the gentle tick-tick-tick of a clock that hung on the wall opposite him.

He'd been taken off the drip now, and was able to hold down his food for more than ten minutes at a time. As far as the doctors were concerned, Allen was making a good recovery. A physical recovery, that was most likely the case. Mentally... he wasn't too sure. In just ten days, he'd witnessed things that nobody in their right mind should ever see in an entire lifetime. Three deaths, two of them practically right in front of his face. One friend stabbing another friend in the arm, demanding drugs and threatening to crush her neck.

Andrea, beaten to nearly an inch of her life, and floating face down in the water.

Allen feared that he would never get over it all.

He stood up, and fell back down into his seat again with a small hiss of discomfort, his legs having gotten too used to sitting down. After stretching his legs to remove the cramp in his muscles, he got back to his feet and decided on taking a walk around the building, just to take his mind off those events in the past.

He walked for about a couple of minutes when he heard footsteps coming from a doorway to his right. He quietly approached it and poked his head inside, listening to the reverberations echoing off the walls and stairs. There was a quiet click, and then silence. 'What's going on up there?' Allen wondered, starting to climb up the stairwell on tiptoes. 'Why is someone going up here... oh no, they haven't found us, have they?!'

Someone had tipped the terrorists off and now they were assembling nearby, ready to enter the hospital with all guns blazing, planning on finishing what they'd started. That least, that was what he feared.

Allen reached the top of the stairs and quietly approached the doorway that stood ahead. The door was left ajar, the cool Canadian breeze drifting through the gap and giving Allen goosebumps on his arms. He paused just by the door, listening carefully. No voices, no sounds of weaponry being primed, nothing. He slowly opened the door, being careful not to dislodge the piece of wood placed down on the floor.

There was nobody on the roof, nothing at all of interest. Or immediate danger, thank God.

Scratch that, there was someone out there. Whoever it was, they were sitting on the roof ledge with their legs dangling over the edge. Sitting inches away from plummeting to their death.

"H-hey... who's there, what're you doing?" he whispered.

[Brackie]

Brendan heard the voice, and almost immediately registered it as internal, not real. He wasn't sure what lead him to that conclusion, although it may have been the fact that it was really familiar. In fact, it was downright scary how familiar it was, and it took a few seconds of pondering while gazing upon British Columbia to realise that it was the first male voice he'd heard on the island. It was that of that kid he saved on the beach, and it was asking him what he was doing.

Of course, he knew it wasn't real, so he didn't know what he was doing. He didn't know why a ghost from his past was questioning him, questioning him as to why he was doing something he'd been doing for quite a while now. It didn't sound like his psyche. His psyche had more malice, more internal loathing and hatred, and this voice was way too concerned to be from his head.

That was when he noticed someone was only a few feet away from him, on the same rooftop. He turned his head, feet still dangling slightly in the breeze and saw that exact same kid he'd been thinking about, just standing there looking concerned.

"Oh...hey."

Would he recognise him with bandages covering half his face? The Australian accent might cut it, but how was he supposed to confirm it...

"I know you from somewhere. Were you on the beach a few weeks ago?"

[JamesRenard†]

Allen walked towards where the other boy sat, careful to not make any sudden movements; the last thing he wanted to do was startle him and send him tumbling over the edge. God, how ironic would have have been. He gets rescued from a situation in which he had to kill people, and then he goes and causes someone else's death, even if it was an accident.

'Beach, which beach? The beach when we got rescued... wait a sec...!'

Allen recognized the Australian accent, in fact he recognized it very well. His mind cast back to the very first day on the island, when he first woke up, coughing and heaving, scrambling away from the wave that lapped at the shore. Then he met Chris, who was immediately shot dead by a former classmate-turned-psychopath.

Someone had tackled her to the ground before she could do the same to him. The guy told him to run, get away, spoke in an Australian accent. Allen never saw the guy again. And, as horrible as it sounded, he didn't think about him all that often during the ensuing days, seeing as he had been occupied with Andrea and the escape plot she'd been cooking up.

But... was this that same guy, sitting down in front of him?

"Um... yeah, I was," Allen replied, though he was still unsure what time period the boy was talking about. "Were... were you the guy who saved me from Clio? The girl with black and purple hair, back on the first day?" he asked.

[Brackie]

Oh, well there it was. Glad to see he wasn't forgotten here. Such odd feelings swelled around while he tried thinking of the appropriate response here. Wording. It wasn't just his own wording he was worrying about, he was equally puzzled and intrigued with Allen's own wording. He'd referred to one of his former classmates, their former classmates, by description. Must suck to be her. Being dead and all.

But he had his own thing to worry about with Allen. He'd confirmed that yes, Allen did indeed know who he was. He was apparently a saviour.

Funny word, especially to him.

But he was trying to think of the right thing to say. How do you tell someone that yes, you saved their life, without sounding like you knew you were some kind of hero? Cause really, look at him, Brendan was no hero. He tried to say it, though.

Yeah, totally, I saved your life...

...Yeah, I guess, whatever, don't get too upset over it...

...yeah man, I totally saved your life.

Funnily enough, most of the confidence he'd amassed over the weeks away from rights and law fell right off the edge of the building, and he couldn't come up with anything better than meek. He averted his gaze, but ultimately...

"...yeah. Yeah. I did."

[JamesRenard†]

So it was him.

Allen was immensely relieved to know that the person who'd saved his life had also managed to get off the island alive.

Saved his life. He was a life saver.

Funny how some people used the term 'life saver' in a figurative sense most of the time. Not this time though, the guy literally had saved his life. Had he not been around when he was, Allen would have just been another corpse, another victim of Clio Gabriella, lying down on the sand with a bullet hole between his eyes.

"I dunno to say this properly," Allen said, crouching down to the side of Brendan, a fair distance away from the ledge, "but... thank you."

'That sounded real sincere.'

"Really, I don't know how to thank you enough, I mean, you saved me from being killed back there." He breathed out and gazed up at the stars, each little dot of light twinkling faintly. His fallen classmates were up there, somewhere, he surmised. Allen wasn't a deeply religious person, in fact the thoughts of there being a God hardly ever crossed his mind. But if those killed on that island were now indeed at peace somewhere else, then he could take solace in that fact.

"I actually didn't think I'd ever get a chance to thank you properly..." he spoke.