A thud, the blood and a chest

A thud, the blood and a chest. These three things he will never forget, even if he has very little time to commit them to memory and therefore remember later on. The thud left an empty mark on his soul. He had finally reached the chest, only for it to betray him. What clues it revealed only flung him into a despair too deep for swimming, yet he was already wet - so why not? As he straightens up, the blood remains at crouching level, his brain, now a lifeless sponge.

Now as the browning, crinkled and carefully placed note lay teetering between two fingers, Toby realizes that what he had just read will change his life forever. Without knowing it, he had crawled through his mind long enough for his intoxication to fade into his despair and feed it his remaining ounces of blood. He was now as sober as the clearest pane of glass.

The passed few weeks of investigations had left a burden on his shoulders as heavy as the Pacific, but his journey will take him across it, above that water that made his blood so desperate for air. His palm takes off at Sydney, raising into the air, forming a fist. The quick flight felt much longer, but as the cabin crew prepares for landing and the passengers buckle their seatbelts, it opens up, tearing apart the fist. The vessel lands at its destination, his weathered face - the landing strip of an experienced life.

"The blood.." He murmurs.

Though he can't quite form the words he wants - his mind is too busy, a beehive of realizations - he needs to say something, so he recites the deepest and darkest memory he has of the investigation - as if these two words could summarize his entire feeling of the case.

As if feeding one rat to another rat, his thoughts interlocked and ceased to unwind. Imagine a vine growing up a house. The purpose in life of this particular vine is for it to culminate thoughts, ideas, etc. and then when the roots decide they want to express what they have created through this process, the vines fall apart, limp. This is how his thoughts usually acted, but now they simply continue to grow, engulfing the house in green - confusing and yet binding - never limp, forever wound tight, like his thoughts.

These rats would eat eachother without hesitation. Toby remembers his experiences with the prisons. Whenever he visited he remembered looking around him and realizing how cannibalistic these men had become. As if the bars had turned these boys into rats, ready to feast on each other in a mad frenzy, locking themselves away in some thoughtless battle royale. They taught him of the only way to free himself - to loosen his bars, unwind his thoughts and feed his despair. That's what the note had done for him - his despair had sucked his veins dry and left him in a pit of freedom. Finally he was free from the rats, from his supervisors, his peers, his family, the case, his career, his life. He had found the most ultimate, fulfilling despair in a small note, the clue, the piece of the puzzle which he had been forever searching. At last he was free.