Life With A Werewolf

Voice From The Dead Part 6 - Mistakes Have Happened

          Crash had me suspended in the air. I had expected there to be more shouting, more threats. Someone to steal my quips and one-liners since air for me at that moment had become a precious commodity. But instead, Sophia stepped to Elouise. Elouise apparently pushed or threw Sophia, cause she collided with Crash, who released me as he was knocked down.
          That landing was one of the worst I've ever done. I had almost wished I landed on my head. Instead, it was my bad hip that took the brunt of the hit, sending pain up and down my leg, jolting through my back. I bit my lip as I writhed, clenching my eyes shut in a vain effort to shut out the pain. After what felt like eternity, the pain and accompanying muscle spasm finally subsided. The fight was over. Crash was standing over me like then like a guard dog. He even sat on his haunches like a dog, something that he had always swore to me he'd be caught dead doing. If only I wasn't in severe pain and had my camera out.
          "Fucking ouch," I growled, staring up at him.
          He lowered his ears, and looked down. It resembled the dog getting scolded for licking crumbs off the table. "Sorry," he said.
          "What happened," I asked.
          "Kris broke up the fight."
          I looked around. Everyone else was gone. Elouise had apparently taken the guys, and God only knew what happened to Sophia.
          "I...." he gasped, then looked down again. "I'm sorry. I never."
          I gritted my teeth. "You owe me a steak dinner," I said. "I'm talking the best fucking steak too. I want a porterhouse that makes a Filet Minogn look like one crappy things from Waffle House."
          He nodded. "You got it. You okay to stand?"
          "Just get me to the car," I said. It was becoming one hell of a trip.
          We drove in silence for a bit as we took the back way. "I..." he hissed, then said, "I had to do something."
          "I get that," I said. "Who?"
          "Some flunky. Wasn't even mythical. Just some human guy that the Nobility had hired. He had silver, and was determined to take my head. We weren't supposed to be there to..." Crash broke off again, tearing up. He revved the car and began to drive faster. "That's what makes it worse, you know? It was just some civilian, who thought he was doing the right thing. Jason, he was innocent, and I killed him."
          I got it at that moment. There's a difference between killing someone who is ready to kill you. Who has their own weapon locked and loaded, working from their own battle plan and killing someone who was so young and inexperienced they may as well not even be in the fight.
          "I tried to not," he said. "I...tried..."
          "You had no choice," I said.
          "I could have got shot," Crash replied.
          I shook my head. "No. You do that, and then I'll end up dead trying to kill every one of those self-righteous assholes."
          He looked at me for a moment and didn't say anything. We were driving through the back woods then, not paying much attention to where we were going or how we were getting there. Testing the bridge, so to speak, to identify where it had been charred and where to repair things. But his actions, they weren't unfamiliar to me. I'd seen other men self-destruct from such guilt.
          No one knows how to attack you like your own mind. PTSD can turn it into an untamed beast, ready to shred you to ribbons on the slightest provocation. But it's insidious. It's not a flash and suddenly you're standing in a killing field again for a battle you survived a decade ago. It's not like in the movies or the joke in those internet cartoons with all the cutesy animals killing each other.
          It's as simple as a memory. One that could be spurred on by a mundane object or person. A face caught the wrong way. A stop sign with a bullet hole in it. A car with just the right color of dirt on it's bumper and trunk.
          This memory springs two words which are deadly in this situation: "I wish". Then you're off to the races, your mind stringing incident after incident together. Each one your mind trying to go down avenues that had never been, trying to find a solution to mistakes you can never undo, because life has no backspace key. Your emotions rising up inside you as each scenario and failure plays over in your own head and you try to work out what you could have done differently. You know it's futile, but you still feel yourself doing it: slipping into those bonds of mistakes and yesterdays.
          Crash was right there, then. Chained to Yesterday and What Might Have Been. Two insidious task masters that never forgive and never lets you forget. I could tell it in the way his ear tipped down. The sniffles that he tried to hide as his heart broke in a thousand pieces and landed on his cheek fur.
          An idea occurred. One that would either backfire and send him spiraling, or wake him up. I wasn't sure, which. "Pull over," I said pointing to an abandoned parking lot. We were on the edge of a small city, now. And the place used to belong to a mechanic of some kind who probably had died decades ago, but no one wanted the building of. White plaster moss mold and stone. Sun bleached parking lot nearby so you could sit and watch to see if the roof was going to go ahead and cave the rest of the way in.
          "Get out," I said.
          He shook his head. "Come on," I limped over to the side of his car, pulling on his fur. "Get out!"
          Slowly, he climbed to his feet. "Now," I said. "Tell me, what choice did you have?"
          "I could have," he sighed. Then said, "Leaped over him."
          "Oh, so guns don't point up. Gotcha." I arched an eyebrow at him that got a snarl.
          "It was risky, but he'd be alive!" His ears tilted back and he slashed his claws at the air in frustration.
          "And you'd be dead! Hello! Don't you see what this is? You did what you had to do. Anything else, you'd be dead right now and Sophia would be snarling directions at us. We'd all die."
          He looked down, but didn't say anything. "You'd be dead, Crash. The war would go on. I'd kill myself trying to kill all of them. You know it's true." Again, he still didn't say anything. I grabbed his muzzle like a dog's, and pointed his eyes at me. "You're a good person, you hear me? Not a monster. A good person. You did what you had to do to survive."
          He pulled his head away, and sat back on the car. It rocked under his weight but held. "I still wish he hadn't forced me to do that."
          "We all do when it's our time," I said. "But, when it's a choice between you or them, damn it, you come home!" Stepping to him, I snarled right in his face and said, "You come home! you know damn well what it would do to all of us if you didn't."
          He nodded, then looked down. After a couple of moments, he looked at me and smiled. With a pat on my head he said, "Good werewolf impression." Taking a heavy sigh, and looking to the sky for a moment, "I guess you're right. It's just...a face I'll always see. Something I promised myself I'd never do again."
          "Wait...again?"
          Crash nodded. "Sophia has a habit," he said, then sighed, looking skyward again. "She's got a habit of taking these dangerous and crazy jobs. The types of things that ensures there will be fights and blood shed. She enjoys it. Makes her feel powerful."
          I limped around to the car, mostly to sit back down and take the pressure off of my sore hip and knee. "Sounds like a party girl. Before I met Sarah, I dated this red head. She liked to go to bars and get me into fights."
          Crash jumped back into the drivers seat and began driving. "Really," he asked.
          I nodded. "Yeah. If I won the fight, the sex was great. Thing was, the type of guys she chose to have me fight? I rarely won."
          He chuckled. "So, why did you agree to it?"
          "I didn't jump into the fights with them! Most of the time I would be sitting at the bar waiting on her to get out of the bathroom or something and some dude built like...well you, would grab me by the shoulder and take a swing."
          He smiled and then shook his head. "Why did you date her?"
          "Young and dumb. The sex, when we had it, was good. But I got tired of being punched, and we didn't have anything else in common. We hated each other I found out. For her half the fun it seems was watching me get punched."
          He laughed, which caused me to laugh. The mood began to lift almost until we got to the compound. I wasn't sure what to expect. Flames. Fires. Werewolves stacked from one barbed wire wall to the other. But, instead what I got was Roam, standing by the gate holding a photograph. Of Crash. "We got trouble."