Something I Can Never Forget

Elijah tossed and turned in his sleep, twitching to and fro, as his mind played tricks on him. Trapped in his own dream, he began to see it play out as it did almost every night, the first of it all this feeling of completely darkness, surrounding, encompassing, swallowing him up and leaving him floating. And then he heard it.

"Just give me your hand!" He could see it now, the smallest beacon of light, far off, drawing him in. He told himself to stay away, that going towards it would just bring him pain, but of course, his mind never listened.

"He's still down there, we have to get him out too!" It'd been years since he'd heard his brother's voice in reality, but in his dreams, he still remembered it as clearly as if he'd heard it only a moment before. "W-we have to help him, Elijah, I think I can reach him!"

"There's no time, the water's getting higher, Nick, give me your hand!" The torrid spray of lapping water stung at the back of his neck as suddenly he was himself seven years ago, a young thirteen year old boy trying desperately to cling to the branches of a high up tree as the water of a flooded town crashed around it's base, building higher and higher, the winds getting stronger, cars and chunks of homes washing around him. Screaming for his brother. Begging.

"I can get him, Eli..." He watched as his brother let go of the branch he'd been holding and dropped, straight down, into the twisting currents of the hurricane that no one had expected, suddenly disappearing into the darks depths.

"Nicholas!" He screamed, and then he'd screamed again, and again, the flashlight that their mother had strapped around his neck shone down into the water as though it would draw his brother back. That had been the last time they'd seen her, trapped beneath the crumbled beam of their basement where they were supposed to have been safe, ordering them to get higher, onto to the car, and then the roof, and finally the old and sturdy tree of their yard when that too had been swallowed up into the waters.

And then his brother had resurfaced and Elijah's heart had jumped then beats to a near stop, the fading light from the nearly dead batteries shaken and slammed against the wood, following his brother's wavering and struggling form as he dragged someone else from the waters towards the branches. He'd hoped. And he'd prayed. And for a few moments, he'd thought that it would be alright.

But he knew better now, and even as he tried to look away, to wake up, his mind played it out. Excited up until this moment, he had begun reaching out. "Give me your hand, Nick, give me your hand, give me your hand!" He just kept screaming it, reaching, his brother smiling, reaching back, the nearly limp and storm-blown body around his shoulders reaching too. He could almost reach them, his fingers brushed the blank faced stranger's hand.

He lurched and grabbed, began pulling them in, every taut and slim muscle of his young body working and begging his brother into the tree, into safety. But it always happened.

Something, some branch or piece of roof, some bit of harmless nothing turned deadly by the screeching winds. All in a moment's flash, took his brother away. And he was left, holding onto the hand of this person his brother had saved, pulling them into the tree, dropping them next to himself. And staring. Down. Down into the swirling, twisting, turning waters of almost complete blackness. The flashlight was grabbed and he searched the surface, banging it as it fizzled out. Again. Again. Until it finally died. "Nicholas...Nicholas? NICHOLAS!" And he was suddenly screaming, at the top of his lungs, screaming until he was so hoarse he could barely breath, screaming until his voice no longer worked and his eyes could see no further.

The storm raged around them and he screamed for what felt like hours in the top of that tree until his voice gave out, and he simply stared. Stared into the darkness of the water below.

Elijah woke as he always did, in the early morning, panting and soaked in cold sweat, tangled in the sheets of his bed, with nothing but the dull beginnings of sunlight to greet him.

Seven years since that day and he'd woken up every day like this since then. It was no surprise.

He rose and washed up, dressing quickly and starting outwards.

Now the once young boy stood a full grown man of twenty, five foot, eleven inches tall, hair dark black but littered with occasional gray strand, cut short and allowed to fall around his face messily. His skin was dark and tanned well, scarred still from those years ago where he'd been hurt, covering well the muscles he'd worked to earn, his own atonement for not being strong enough then.

He wore a pair of black sweat pants and an A-shirt beneath a faded gray hoodie, a pair of running shoes on his feet and a music player strapped to one arm. This was how his mornings always began.

A ten mile jog along the coast line before a shower and then work, his way of mocking the ocean that licked at the shore.

It seemed to have been the one thing that continued to mock him every single night, the fact that some innocent boy had lost his own life in return for his own safety. There had never been a way for Bryant to get a decent night's sleep in his life, the face of the boy always managing to pop up in his thoughts as well as his dreams. His heart seemed to slam up against his ribcage as he found his fingers digging themselves even deeper into the sheets on his bed, facial features contourted in a look of sheer terror and pain, it was that boy again; Nicholas. Breath managing to pass through his lips in torn gasps and pants, sweat falling freely from his face as he managed to pull himself into a sitting position on the bed, no matter what he did, he could never get the face of his rescuer out of his mind, almost as if it had somehow managed to become permenently burned onto his brain.

"Uggh, it never ends..." A short shake of his head was given to remove the face of the other for now at least, fingers shakily running through deep blonde locks that fell carelessly over his eyes, sapphire optics seeming to narrow in silent thought. There was simply no way that he could bring himself to some sort of exception of the events that had gone on that night, even though they had all been extremely young at the time...he should have been the one that had drowned instead of that innocent stranger.

Though that had been quite a few years ago, with him now being a fully grown man, having moved from that place a while ago in hopes that the memories would be left along with the rubble, but no such luck. A slight cough could be heard as he finally pulled himself into a standing position, slowly pulling a pair of pants that had previously been discarded on the floor, up and over his hips, yet another day of trying to forget what had happened in the past and try desperately to start off fresh....but just how long would he be able to try and act as if nothing had happened?

He wasn't entirely sure of the answer to that question, nor did he really care about the answer, to be quite honest, but the one thing that he did seem to know was that if he didn't get a decent night's sleep soon, than he wasn't sure just what might happen.

He hadn't realized it when it had happened, or that it was even happening at all, but he'd somehow slowly moved himself away from his old home. In the course of a single night, he'd lost his entire family, his mother and father burried in the crumbling remains of their home, one crushed, the other pinned, all of it swept away as his brother had eventually been; and in the course of seven years, he had managed to move himself clear across the continent. Running along the cool blue backdrop where the ocean melted away into the softening colors of morning sky, he tried to lose himself in the mixture of silence and softly playing music, mind honed on nothing at all. Until the sound of the occasional memory creeped in. "NICHOLAS!" Screamed in his head, over and over again, a shattering, heartwrenching scream of terror, but by far, not the worst. "I can get him, Eli..."

Where what echoed those last few miles of the run, the part where he had to truly push his legs and arms to drag himself just a little further, to work just a little harder, when they ached and burnt and made him breath heavily. Those words, so soft and almost unheard, a distant echo of a sound he'd never hear again, a voice forever gone. It was all that made him finish rather than collapsing in on himself, it was all that kept him living, the need to be stronger, the need to defy all else.

Finally finished, panting softly and sweating, he checked his watch, the hours hitting near six a.m. when the rest of the civilized world began to wake and greet the morning, a short walk to cool down to where he kept his car in a parking garage downtown.

Not more than a few minutes later, he was headed towards a gym and spa in the business district where he'd wash up and clean off and dress from the locker that he kept there before going on to work. This was his routine, how he lived his life since then, and it had saved him more than once from lying in an empty bed, staring at the ceiling, and wondering when death would come for him as it had for everyone else he cared for.

Another one of the things he hadn't realized, one of the many, was when he had started keeping track of the man his brother had saved. Name, age, location, occupation, he'd been keeping track of all of it, nothing too impressive, nothing like a private investigator, just sharing of information.

Name, age, they had been easy, they weren't hard to forget after the first time he'd heard them; location, well, that had been easier once he'd started working a little higher up the food chain, which came to be known with occupation. It'd been an accident, really, a resume he'd stumbled across one day, same name, same birthdate, and when he'd looked, well, it was a face he'd never forgotten either. And since then, well, it'd just been a matter of looking him up in the catalogued resume directory and suddenly, he knew almost everything about him. It wasn't as though he was stalking him, no, he'd never gotten up the nerve to actually seek him out, but somehow, it was...oddly...interesting, to know he was still alive.

Another hour or so and, dressed now in a well fit suit, hair fixed and slicked back, the opposite of the man who had left his house this morning. Small, sleek black car to work, the smooth black suit stepped out, black hair pulled back, he walked, the epitome of darkness and strength, into the building and towards his office.

It had been a few days since Bryant had actually been back from some kind of important business meeting long enough to actually go in and take verbal abuse from the men and women that were higher up on the corporate ladder, what joy it was indeed on his part. Eyes seemed to follow him all of the way as he carefully weaved in and out of the many different cubicles that littered the room, it wasn't unknown by the secretaries in the building that he wasn't a bad looking man at all, in fact he had been asked out by a few of them numerous times before. "Just another day doing another guys dirty work.." A deep sigh was heard from him as he took a few seconds to breathe in and out before finally opening the door that led to the bigwigs of the entire company, glares and looks of disdain seemed to bore into the back of his skull as he held tightly onto the large stack of papers held at his side, it just so happened that he was the personal assistant of the second most powerful hotshot in this building...stuck doing all the meaningless tasks that Mr. High-and-mighty himself didn't want to be caught dead actually doing that is.

Julian seemed to almost throw a fit when he saw Bryant walk through the door, practically tearing the finished proposal out of his hands. "I thought I told you not to be late, it's only about ten minutes until I have to hand these blueprints in..." A roll of his eyes was the only response given from Bryant before he turned and walked away, though Julian didn't seem to notice the fact that he was even gone, nor did he really care in the long run...as long as he got what he wanted, Bryant wasn't out of a job, and this was the only thing standing in the way of said Bryant giving him a piece of his mind.

'Someday' It was the only thought that seemed to keep him from lunging out at the other, being his workhorse was worth it in the longrun, he just had to put up with it for a little longer...than he'd knock Julian flat on his ass without so much as a second thought.

[A little short, I realize that, and the lemons will be in the future chapters. Please R|R! Edward and I love comments ^-^]