morning after

[toujours_nigel]

still writing for the prompt 'loss',.
 
this from Kaminey. a missing scene of sorts, the day after the shootout.

warnings, disclaimers, etc: not mine, angst, character death, read at own risk, implied slash, rated around r. prompt courtesy dearlyderanged.

*** *** *** ***

He gets back home—heavily bandaged, nobody had wanted to turn him loose, but nobody had been able to keep him there—to Mansoor’s face funereal in the midst of restored chaos. Somebody’s tried to tidy up, but there is still blood on the floor where it must have slowly dripped from Mikhail’s fingers, trailing his arm, and he can see vada pao crumbs under the table.

 

He ignores Mansoor and makes for the inner room which smells only faintly of blood and gunpowder, and lets himself slowly down on the bed. His shoulder hurts. He cannot move his arm. He cannot sleep, even heavily sedated, because his father’s mouth opens and caresses him with Mikhail’s voice.

 

“Charlie,” Mansoor says, comes and sits on the edge of the bed, his weight depressing the mattress. He needs a new mattress. “Charlie, you have to get up.”

 

“Why?” He will get up, he can’t stay here, he has things to get rid of, stones to hock.

 

“The bodies. They have to be disposed of.” It is easy, sometimes, to forget that Mansoor’s done far worse than Mujeeb’s ever made anyone.

 

“You want me to help lug Bhope’s corpse?” His eyes have come open of their own, of astonishment.

 

“No, Charlie. Mikhail’s. Dada’s. Shumon’s.” There’s something in Mansoor’s voice very close to pity. “They’re lying in the morgue. We have to claim them.”

 

“They’re all dead.” Of course they are.

 

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Mansoor says, then, urgent, “Charlie, we have to go now.”

 

If they have to, then they have to, and he climbs out of bed, out of the gone-for-scrap railway carriage he pretends is home, into Mansoor’s perfectly-like-every-other Sumo. They identify and claim the bodies and when Mansoor drives him up Peddar Road instead of Mumbai Central, he stays silent, and trudges up the stairs to Mikhail’s sterile rooms and falls asleep on his bed. Here he manages to stay awake, all night, all morning, while Mikhail gleams down at him from photo frames and things set slightly askew and the rainbow tangle that he dresses from, after Mansoor and Shukla have arranged the funerals.

 

They inter Mujeeb at the bada kabristan. They burn Shumon at the ghat. They stand around discussing whether or not Mikhail was in fact a Christian while his body swelters in its too-gaudy coffin. It isn’t as though Mikhail would have cared. It isn’t as though Mikhail believed. It isn’t, fuck it all, as though it matters. But he stands while they hash it out, one hand tight around the gilded handle of the coffin. He helps lift it down. He throws the first clod of earth.

 

He goes back to his scrap-iron home, feeling like an extra on Amar, Akbar, Anthony gone horribly wrong, and sleeps, exhausted and filthy, through Mikhail’s rotting hands on his body and his father’s mouth on his and Guddu’s eyes, sullenly interested, watching him turn tricks in alleys for strangers who become Bhope paying him to fellate handguns.