Groundlings

Three whole weeks had passed since the dead man had arrived at camp. Or rather, since he had been brought there by the scouts that had stumbled over his wretched carcass in the forest. Three weeks, filled with nothing but painful reunions. They hurt almost more than his leg did, burning holes through the walls he had put up around his memories of the better days. Three weeks Starling could still barely say a single word, could barely remember how.
And for three weeks, his own twin brother hadn’t so much as looked at him once. That goddamn murderous drunk. Starling would have to find him himself if he was going to get closure. And by god, did he need it. He would not let it slip between his fingers because Finch was still an asshole.
And so, when Starling had regained some of his strength, he was finally allowed to stand with the aid of two of the medics and the best pair of makeshift crutches they had. He had recovered slowly at first, but as the infection in his entire body went down, he could think more clearly, and the time he had spent out in the wild on his own had strengthened his body beyond what he would have ever expected of himself.
Soon enough, they were letting him crutch around camp by himself as long as he promised to be careful, citing that it would be good for his psyche to be unsupervised for some short times. Starling deserved his privacy as much as everyone else, they said, and he couldn’t help but agree.
Finding Finch was easy enough. He had always been a loner growing up, he had always liked sitting by himself away from all the noise so long as he wasn’t the center of it. But Finch loved attention, and he drew it to himself by casting himself out. An odd, self destructive stragety, but it had always worked. Starling found him at the edge of the camp half obscured by a bush, with his own private fire and more private thoughts than Starling cared to guess. Slowly, he lowered himself to the ground next to him and put aside his crutches - barely more than large sticks. Branches broken from some of the larger trees in the area.
Finch did not move.
Starling cleared his throat.
Finch did not move.
Starling cleared his throat again, louder and more pointed than the first time.
Finch did not move.
“Hey,” Starling said. His voice sounded strange to him. It was still gritty and hoarse from the sickness and his disuse of it. The back of his throat still burned when he spoke and swallowed, so he tried his best to avoid both. It would take him a long time still to shake the illnesses that had been plaguing him. “Hey,” he said again.
Still, Finch did not move. He simply sat staring into the fire, as if he thought that pretending hard enough would make Starling simply disappear.
“Hey,” he repeated, a little louder.
Finch did not move.
Starling sighed. “Classic avoidance, huh? Hm, well, I always thought you were better than that.” Then again, I always thought you were better than straight up murder in broad daylight too.
Finch leaned forward, still staring into the dancing flames. “What do you want?” he asked, barely audible over the soft crackling of the wood.
Leaning back a little bit, Starling stayed silent for a good minute. “I don’t know,” he said finally, slowly.
Finch groaned, still not taking his eyes away from the fire. “Then leave me alone.”
“No,” Starling said.
Finch did not move.
“You’re in real deep shit, you know that?” Starling let his voice grow a little stronger, more agitated. He had known this was going to be difficult, Finch was never an easy man to deal with. He never had been. But this was on a whole new level, one that left a foul taste in Starling’s mouth.
Or was that just vomit on its way up? Only one way to find out.
“Yeah, I got the news already. Thanks, bro, for telling me nothing I don’t already know,” Finch snapped, picking up one of the small sticks from the ground that had rolled off his pile of kindling and fiddling with it.
Starling closed his eyes. “Listen, Finch,” he started, “I don’t want to have this conversation any more than you do.”
“Then don’t,” Finch said, deadpan.
“Is that all you’ve got to say? I don’t even get an ‘I’m sorry’? Not even a goddamn ‘hello’?” Starling asked, waving his arm. Cool it, he told himself.. This won’t go well if you don’t keep a lid on it.
Finch shook his head. “Nope,” he said.
“Why?” Starling pushed.
Finch snapped the twig in half. “I don’t talk to dead men.”
Starling rolled his eyes and leaned forward. “Well, clearly, I’m not dead,” he said. “Gotta give you an A plus for trying your hardest, though.
Finch glanced to the side, into the darkness. He was getting very uncomfortable, Starling could see it. “You’re real fuckin’ dead to me, okay?”
“Yeah, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Starling said before he could stop himself.
Heaving a sigh, Finch turned to face him. “You know what? Yeah, I would.”
And Starling saw remorse in his brother’s eyes. They sat there looking at each other for a time neither of them knew, two men staring at their mirror images and both finding that the mirror was broken. “Oh, Finch,” Starling croaked. Tears stung in his eyes. “Why did you do it?” It was the burning question, the one that had bothered Starling ever since it happened. It had gnawed on the back of his mind unrelentlessly, leaving him unable to sleep, unable to find any sort of peace when he truly needed it. Until now.
But Finch simply shrugged. “I… I’m not completely sure,” he started.
“Excuse me?” Starling asked.
“I want to call it an accident but I don’t think it was,” Finch said, turning away again. “I don’t know what really happened. I was at least a little bit tipsy and we were just fighting and all of a sudden you were over the railing.”
Starling was livid. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he very nearly shouted. His breath caught the hitch in his throat and threw him into a coughing fit. When he recovered, his shoulders shook silently and tears streamed down his gaunt face. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he repeated quietly, his voice full of hurt. There was no answer. There was no reason.
Finch poked at the fire. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “A lot, that’s for damn sure.”
Starling nodded in agreement. “You felt guilty, though,” he said.
Finch looked at him, raising an eyebrow. “What makes you say that, brother dear?”
“You sent Lee to jail instead,” Starling said. “Don’t think I don’t know about that. Don’t think they haven’t told me.”
“Lee’s always been a little crazy, Starling,” Finch said. Starling hit him across the face. It was a weak hit, his arms still barely worked in tandem with his brain, but it had been hard enough to smart for a few minutes. Finch cursed and touched his cheek where he had been struck.
“You framed them,” Starling spat through gritted teeth. “You sent them in your place because you didn’t want to own up to it. Didn’t want to admit to yourself how much of a fucking monster you are, Finch. That sound right?”
To Starling’s surprise, Finch nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Sounds about right.”
“Dumbass,” Starling said.
“What?”
“Dumbass,” he repeated. “What did you think you would gain from that? Peace of mind? Please, Finch, you look like absolute shit. When’s the last time you got a good night’s sleep, huh?”
Finch did not answer, he simply returned to gazing into the fire, as if it held the answers to the universe. Starling was having none of this bullshit.
The medics were probably looking for him by now. He would have to go, now, if he wanted to keep them from worrying. And he did. They were lovely people and he owed his life to them. Worrying them was the last thing he was going to do. So he reached for his crutches and planted them firmly on the ground, heaving himself upwards. It was slow and painful and took more strength than he had, and quickly Starling found himself slumped over in the dirt once more.
And then Finch was there. He said nothing, and avoided eye contact, but his hands were steady on Starling’s arms, gripping tight and lifting him up. Starling’s hands found the tops of his crutches and he pulled, finally straightening up. As much as he could, with his badly healed ribcage messing with his spine.
Starling glanced at Finch, but Finch had already moved on and sat back down, beginning an attempt to pull the stopper out of a flask with his teeth. Starling considered thanking him, just for a brief moment, then thought better of it and left.
By this time, many of the fires had been put out. Starling was left alone in the near dark, often having to ask people to move out of his way for “just a second, I swear” on his way back to the cart. When he finally found it again, he sat himself down and pulled his crutches up into the cart bed with him, then stretched out his legs as far as they could go.
Under the pain of his right stump, both legs were equally sore and aching. That had to be some kind of good sign, Starling thought. At least the nerves were functional, or something to that effect. He was no doctor, but all he knew was that if he did manage to heal up well enough, he would be able to walk again with the aid of a prosthetic.
But where in the hell was he going to get one of those out here? The only ones who would have been capable of offering that sort of help were back at home in their cushy treehouses, profiting entirely off the groundguards who served and fell in the name of Sequoia itself. Wow, Starling, he thought. That’s bitter.
He supposed he had reason to be. His life story was beginning to turn into a laughable series of tragedies, true salvation always just barely out of his reach. It was a good thing his arms were growing stronger. Perhaps he could reach just a little further, somehow. Perhaps he would be able to save his own life from the building that burned down around it.
And then what? He would live as an outcast, put on a pedestal as a survivor, as a showpiece. A monument to the monumental strength and perseverance of mankind. And he would be ostracized to no end. The man who came back from the dead. The man who did what others could not. He would be resented by those whose loved ones had suffered his same fate and had not been as lucky as he had been. He would be ridiculed for the limp he would walk with for the rest of his life, for his inability to stand straight for the rest of his life.
He had Magpie, Jay and his wife Angela, and their little kids. They still knew him for Starling Anderson, the man he had been before he had died. But most of the others who he could say the same for had changed. His cousin and best friend Selsdon Pope was dead. Cate McCarthy, who had been Selsdon’s girlfriend at the time of his death, and had attended many of their get togethers, was far too busy to acknowledge him. After all, she was heading off this whole thing by herself, for the most part. She’d always talked grandly of doing something unforgettable, making her mark in history. She was doing a marvelous job of it so far. Atta girl, Starling thought proudly. You’re doing great.
Still, whenever she found the time to address him, she would probably only do so formally. You had to make sacrifices when you were as deeply fundamental in public service as she was. He knew she would probably like to talk with him and just take a day off at some point, they had gotten along well before everything happened. But they both knew that was impossible. No, she would give him some kind of medal, perhaps, praise him as a hero and a survivor and a symbol of their collective strength, and move on to more important matters than the cripple someone found in the woods.
Yes, Starling would be alone. He thought about this as he stared up at the stars, clearer than he had ever seen them before. It had been raining for two days prior, and before that the great hulking Sequoias had blocked out almost all of the sky. He waited under the bright canopy of twinkling lights for his night medic to come and check on him.
The night medic came, a young man he had seen a few times before. The boy seemed nervous unwrapping Starling’s leg bandages. Starling couldn’t blame him, it had to be an unpleasant experience for both parties involved. The boy washed the stump carefully and gently. The cool water that splashed on it soothed some of the burning pain away and Starling exhaled and closed his eyes, savoring that one small sweet moment.
And then the pain came back, even as the nervous young man smeared the antiseptics into the wound and wrapped it up again with a fresh bandage. He was gentle the whole way through, Starling was just extremely sensitive to pain. He always had been and he cursed it now. He should have tried to tough up earlier in life when he had had the chance.
He had missed the chance. So he grit his teeth against the pain and carried on, eating the small dinner he was brought and taking the pills they gave him. He felt bad about it, but Starling still ate like any food he saw would be his last. They had given him no reason to suspect them of anything shady, and yet he could not shake the thought. It would, he believed, take him a long time to achieve that. Proper healing never came fast, he had been told as a child. And so he waited for it to come, waited in that damned wagon with its damned loose wheel that went haywire over every damn rock in its path. Starling swore he had at least a handful of bruises under his hair from that damn wheel rattling about.
Starling sighed as the medic finally withdrew, leaving him alone to sleep. He did not try, he knew he would not be able to. So he simply put his arms behind his head as a makeshift pillow and stared up at the stars. They looked so much like the little strung lights back at home, tiny dots of warmth and brightness against a dark field. Back home in Sequoia, they had crisscrossed the city, over bridges and public walks and houses alike. Strung in the spaces between lampposts and wrapped around stray branches that poked out of someone’s home or office.
The stars, he figured, simply hung from the heavens themselves. He watched them twinkle and waver far above them, drew lines between them, imagined them strung up in his childhood bedroom like the ordinary lights he had had. And now, staring at the stars and the open sky above him, Starling felt comfortable for the first time in a long time. It felt like home to him.
Eventually, calmed and comforted by the stars, his eyes fell shut and sleep claimed him.