~~~~~
Will Walsh was a jumbled up mess of confused emotions. That was, perhaps, to be expected given the situation in which he had managed to land himself. It all came, he knew, from his propensity over the previous few years to start experiencing and doing the unexpected. Will didn’t like anything unexpected. He had outright hated it as a child. A surprise party once when he was eight had reduced him to tears (and they were most definitely not the happy kind). School assemblies that interrupted his regular day had thrown him off kilter for days at a time. He was a child who thrived on routine more so than the average.
He hadn’t changed much as an adult. He had wanted his life to run on expected paths. He had plans and goals and an entire world that had been designed to run in a nice simple, predictable pattern. Then, there had been Karen. There was nothing expected about Karen, and he hadn’t hated that. Then, there had been Connor Ridley’s intrusion into his life, and Meredyth Lawson’s inability to leave him alone. He hadn’t cared much for either of those, but he dealt with them because they had the potential to involve Karen. He did a lot of unexpected, nonroutine, this is so far out of his life plan that he might never get it put back the way it had been before kind of things for Karen.
Karen was worth stepping out of his comfort zone. He loved her. He loved her with an intensity that he had never really expected his somewhat staid (boring she would say) self to be capable of demonstrating. It was a little frightening and a lot exhilarating all at the same time (most of the time). Right now, however, he wanted nothing more than to find his beloved Karen and wring her neck for putting him through this. He wasn’t entirely sure that he was not, in fact, currently suffering a heart attack, and it was entirely her fault. He couldn’t even begin to guess what it was that she had been thinking. He was willing to bet (and gambling was so not his style but she had managed to push him right over the edge so that he was barely being rational anymore let alone using his normal style of speech and thought processes) that she hadn’t been thinking at all.
How sad was it that her impulsivity was one of the things that he liked about her and now it was going to drive him into an early grave? He took a deep breath and tried to think of calming thoughts. It was hard to do what with the uncertainty and the worry and the general up in the airness of it all that didn’t leave him any expected or routine options on which he could fall back.
If Connor tried to play the understanding card one more time, then he was going to do something completely out of character (like smack the understanding expression off the other man’s face). He didn’t want to hear about patience. He didn’t want to hear about contingency plans. He didn’t want to hear about making sure of details. He wasn’t feeling very detail orientated. That had gotten left behind somewhere in the dust with his routines (and apparently his ability to be level headed). He was feeling reckless -- in the go rushing in without bothering with a plan and probably getting someone shot by security guards kind of a way. Which was the only reason why he was sitting there contemplating how much better it would make him feel to throw something at Connor’s head instead of actually chucking something at Connor’s head and rushing out to execute said unplanned rescue debacle that would inevitably end with bloodshed.
That didn’t mean that he was being patient (or particularly pleasant he was sure the others would add if they weren’t so strictly adhering to the whole tip toe carefully around the man who is about to explode course of action they seemed to have adopted) about it. He was probably on Anna’s last nerve, but he really didn’t care. Anna wasn’t on his list of favorite people at the moment. (He was pretty sure that he didn’t even have a list of favorite people at the moment, and he was equally sure that he was in the midst of having a nervous breakdown because who actually thought about having a list of favorite people? Was he a 14 year old girl?)
He wanted . . . no, he needed to be doing something soon. The lack of purposeful activity was going to cause something very bad to happen to him more quickly than the worry over Karen was (and that was plenty quick enough in the first place). He couldn’t keep doing this. This was it. This was the last straw. He was getting out. He was getting Karen out. He wasn’t an idealist. He wasn’t a crusader. He wasn’t noble or concerned with the bigger picture or committed to fighting evil and injustice or any of that. The whole point of being involved was to keep Karen safe. The only reason he was involved was to keep Karen safe. It was to give him a safe little life to go to when the dust settled. It wasn’t so that Karen would end up in the middle of it anyway. That had not been a part of the plan.
He should have made her stay out of it. He should have done a better job of hiding the fact that there was an “it” in the first place. He should have sent her away when she decided to take an interest. He should have been commanding and laid down the proverbial law. That thought actually brought him out of his mental disturbance enough to almost make his lips twitch up in some semblance of a grin (almost). He couldn’t keep Karen out of anything that she wanted to be involved in; Karen did what she wanted when she wanted. That was just her. He couldn’t even make himself wish that it wasn’t her because then she wouldn’t be her and he wouldn’t want her if she wasn’t her which would make this whole mental anguish track he was on even more pointless than it was already.
He did wish he hadn’t missed the signs that must have shown up when she suddenly started taking it all so seriously. He might have been able to do a little steering (or at least some mitigation) so that they hadn’t ended up where they were now. How was he supposed to have known? Since when did Karen think that any of this actually mattered? Since when did Karen think that she needed to be involved? Actually, physically involved? And how in the world did he not see it when it had happened? That type of a switch in thinking should have been easy enough to notice. He hadn’t noticed. He had thought that she was still on the same half-joking, none of this is as serious as you all seem to think it is, goading at times page. He hadn’t dreamed that she had crossed over to the she needed to do something about it page. That was not a page that she was supposed to be on; it wasn’t even a page that was supposed to exist!
There was no page in the plan for Karen to be actually involved. She was never supposed to get involved. She wasn’t actually even supposed to know that there was something to be involved in, but Will glossed over that in his head. It was a reminder that nothing ever turned out as expected with Karen, and those were not thoughts with which he wished to be confronted while he was banking on someone coming up with a functional plan that would go according to plan. She would just have to get uninvolved. That was all that there was to it. She would be safe. She would be back, and she would be uninvolved. It was even going to happen in that order.
What had she been thinking? He was so angry at her right now he couldn’t even think straight. Granted, he wasn’t overly happy with anyone at the moment. He had plenty of ire to go around because this clearly wasn’t just Karen’s fault. To start with, there was plenty of blame to throw at Connor Ridley. It was his brilliant idea to start this little crusade. What had he been thinking? Everything he had ever thought about Connor and his hero complex and how the world (specifically Will’s world) would have been a whole lot better off if Connor didn’t think he had to run around acting like he should be wearing a cape and shopping for spandex was being brought vividly to the forefront of his mind.
Who was to say that his brother and not so very pleasant to be around sister-in-law were actually really trying to accomplish anything all that sinister? Connor did. How did he know? How could he be sure? Maybe it had all been a huge misunderstanding all along. Maybe Connor had delusions of heroics that required there be a villain present. He had merely focused in on the easiest targets to suspect that he had at hand. Maybe they really were up to something. Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad if they succeeded. Again, how did he know that there was anything wrong wi
th what they were doing? Because Connor said so? Maybe everything would be better if Meredyth just got to get along with whatever she was plotting. Maybe everybody should just get out of her way and let her get to it. How did he know that that wasn’t how it was? Connor again. Why did he take Connor’s word for things? Why did he let Connor suck him in to his “the fate of the world is at stake” mission? Why had he even let Connor talk to him on the topic in the first place? Why should he have trusted Connor? Why should he trust Connor now? Why shouldn’t he have just walked away and left Connor and all of his stories and claims and plans and grandiose idealism in the dust on that very first day? Why did Connor Ridley get to decide what the fate of the world should be? Why did Connor Ridley get to decide anything about the fate of the world at all? Why did Connor Ridley get to decide who got let in on his ideas about the fate of the world? Why did Connor Ridley choose him to get involved?
Out of all the people in the world that the other man could have gone to to plead his case, what had possessed him to go to Will Walsh? What made it seem like he was a good choice to have his life uprooted and his worldview rearranged and to be in this constant state of disturbance? What made him look like he should have to have this kind of responsibility? Why in the world had Will even let him get beyond the first sentence of his explanation? What made Connor Ridley so special?
There was plenty of anger to direct at Connor, but Will bit his tongue. Having a nervous breakdown (or a heart attack or whatever it was that he was having) aside, he hadn’t lost complete control of his mental faculties yet. Karen’s well-being took precedence over his thoughts and feelings at the moment, and (unfortunately for the venting of those said thoughts and feelings) Karen’s well-being depended on assistance from the people at whom he would rather be yelling. Connor was the hardest to bite his tongue around.
Anna was equally subject to his displeasure, but the urge to give voice to it was easier to control than it was when it came to Connor. He had recriminations enough -- ones about creating things without considering how they might be misused and ones about how she had never bothered to be even marginally polite to Karen in the first place so how was it supposed to be comforting to think that she was being depended on to help? He didn’t say them. They wouldn’t be satisfying in the same way as words to Connor would be. Instinct told him that Anna wouldn’t hear them (in the same manner that experience told him that Connor would be easy to push into guilt). He rather thought that Anna made a habit of not hearing much of anything when she didn’t want to hear it. That she was caught up in her programming or her planning or her information gathering and didn’t notice what was being said around her seemed to him to be a convenient excuse that she played as a trump card whenever she happened to feel like it.
He, however, wasn’t taking any chances, and if her current level of activity was really being directed toward getting Karen back safely where she belonged, then he wasn’t going to chance any distractions. He needed Anna at the top of her game (however appalling it was to place Karen’s continued safety into the hands of someone that he was certain didn’t even like to be in the same room with her). Besides, Anna might let any comments he made flow in one ear and out the other, but Connor wouldn’t be as likely to let them go. The other man tended to be rather defensive when it came to all things Anna McKee, and he was refraining from doing anything that might make Connor disinclined to be helpful.
He needed Connor to be helpful. Karen needed Connor to be helpful. They needed him to employ those heroic tendencies of his in an altogether helpful manner. There was a part of him that was constantly reminding him that the odds that they would leave him twisting in the wind because they were annoyed or angry or being just plain petty were nonexistent. They weren’t those kinds of people. He knew that. He had found it to be true in an excruciating to deal with grating on your every nerve sort of way for ages now.
Connor was the stuff of which fictional heroes were made -- in all their obnoxious glory. There was, Will had long ago concluded, a reason why so many fictional heroes were loners. It was because no one could stand to deal with that level of intensely focused rightness day in and day out. It was exhausting, and it made you feel insecure about your own personal stances. It was an unpleasant manner in which to spend your life, and Will was banking his wife to be’s well-being on the fact that Connor and Anna both would do the hero thing and come to the rescue of someone that neither one of them particularly cared for who had gone off on her own and gotten herself into trouble and potentially injured their greater cause in the process.
His heart was pounding again. That could not be a normal rate for it to be going. His blood pressure had likely exceeded all acceptable levels and was putting such a strain on his circulatory system that things that shouldn’t be popping were going to start popping all over the place. Was it petty that he was thinking that he wouldn’t feel very bad about getting blood all over Anna’s carpet when it started spurting out of his eyes or wherever it was going to start spurting from because he knew how he felt and spurting was a definite possibility?
Karen would say some sensible nursey thing like how that wasn’t physically possible, but she wasn’t here to tell him that (which was why he was going to start bleeding in medically impossible manners any moment now). He wanted to wring her neck. He had never seen that as anything other than a casually used phrase before, but he really, really wanted to shake her (if not actually wring her neck). Shaking sounded really good (with maybe a dash of yelling thrown in for good measure). Then, maybe whatever was clearly rolling around in the wrong place inside her head would fall back into the right one. She would get her priorities back in order and understand that she was never, ever to be involved in anything that had anything to do with Ridleys or McKees or Lawsons or Wyatt or Meredyth ever again.
He took some more deep breaths. This was not helping. He needed some clarity and thinking about how angry he was at Karen (not to mention all the tangentially related thoughts about blood spurting from various orifices) was not doing him any good in the thinking clearly department. He was just so mad at her -- not that that meant that there wasn’t plenty more anger to go around. He could find a healthy dose for pretty much everybody. He was angry at Kyle for trudging around alternating between looking like someone had kicked his puppy and being all righteously indignant that everyone else knew that his pseudo girlfriend had played him. It was his fault that Karen had kicked her new obsession into high gear anyway. It had been his refusal to deal with the reality that the little girl he was all enamored with couldn’t be trusted that had led to him supplying her with information that had made their last altercation with Meredyth blow up in all of their faces.
If Kyle had kept his mouth shut (and why was he even included in this little do gooder club in the first place), then things wouldn’t have gone south with the whole Lansing fiasco. If he hadn’t been distracted by that whole issue, then he surely would have noticed that Karen had taken the whole thing to heart in a way that she hadn’t before. The fall through with Lansing had been what had gotten Karen all determined that she was going to help. That things had gone wrong there had been all on Kyle and his issues with trusting untrustworthy people (one specifically).
He had plenty of ire to direct at his brother and his wife. If they weren’t such power hungry morally defective tyrant wannabes, then none of this would have started in the first place. If Meredyth hadn’t had such a need to micromanage that she had to make things personal to him, then he would have stayed out of it all (and thus Karen would have as well) at the beginning. If Meredyth wasn’t so freakishly creepy that he had no problem believing that she would go after him and his in morally reprehensible ways, then he might have been able to blow the whole thing off and walk away. If Wyatt hadn’t turned into such a psycho with a propensity for putting bullets into people that he decided were in his way, then he wouldn’t be so spastically worried for Karen’s saf
ety. If Wyatt just wasn’t Wyatt, then his mental health in general would be a whole lot better. If Lia Lawson hadn’t turned into a side jumping menace, then Karen wouldn’t have gone looking for an altercation.
He had plenty of anger to go around, and he had nothing constructive to do with it. It was just building up leaving him tenser and tenser, and he was going to explode if he didn’t have something concrete to do about his girlfriend in short order. The pent up anger had to go somewhere. He had a nice helping of it for Karen. Had he mentioned that? He kept coming back to it. She was irresponsible and short sighted and trouble causing and what had she been thinking? She hadn’t been thinking, and he was going to have a heart attack. He was going to have a heart attack any minute now, or it still might be a stroke. It could be the blood spurting. It was going to be something. All of the stress that Karen had put him under was going to cause some sort of bleeding in his brain any minute now. He wouldn’t be doing any wringing of her neck when they got her back because he was going to be unconscious or have lost the ability to move his arms or something.
He focused on taking deep breaths. He had arrived back at the bleeding portion of his thinking. He didn’t seem to be able to get away from it. He focused on not having a stroke (although he wasn’t certain if that didn’t actually make him more likely to have one). Karen would have been able to tell him, but (yet again) she wasn’t there to tell him anything. She wasn’t there to tell him that he needed to loosen up or learn to breathe or not take things so seriously or any of the other things that Karen was always telling him that he better be getting to hear her say in person again (soon). He focused on not barking out angry words at anyone who wandered within his line of sight. He focused on making sure that he wasn’t a complete basket case so that he was ready to go do whatever they needed to go do whenever they finally had a plan.
What was taking so long with the coming up with a plan? Could they not see that he was going to start stress related bleeding in the brain any minute now? What were they even doing? He physically forced himself to stop (and that meant actually physically applying pressure with his hands against his knees to make their up and down, jittery motion cease) fidgeting. With that accomplished, he tried to turn his efforts at self-control to less physical aspects.
His thoughts weren’t as easy to direct. He was still too worried and too angry (mostly at himself). If he had been willing to give her up, but he hadn’t been (he still wasn’t). If he had been better at drawing lines, but he hadn’t been. If he had done a better job of watching out for her, but he hadn’t. He had failed her. He had failed to keep the things she shouldn’t have had to have known about away from her. He had failed to be there when she needed someone to come sailing in to stop her from running off to do something stupid (so very, very stupid). He hadn’t protected her. He still wasn’t protecting her. He was depending on others to protect her for him. He had been useless. He was still useless. He couldn’t deal with that.
It ended now. As soon as he got her back, it was all ending. Someone else could do this. Someone else could deal with the pressure and the worry and the frustration with an inability to do enough tangible things to make an actual difference. It was his fault. It was his fault for bothering to be involved in the first place, and he would be rectifying that as soon as he could collect Karen and hustle her off into the sunset or wherever it was that people went when they got themselves far, far away from people playing at being in the hero business.
He was too busy focusing on what he was going to do next to pay attention to Anna trying to get his attention. Anna was trying to get his attention? He blinked up at her and tried to regain his focus on the actual room in which he was physically present.
“Her cell phone is being used,” Anna repeated. His hand found its way to his pocket as he finally processed that the vibration he was feeling was actually his phone and not the incessant tapping up and down that his leg kept doing. He nearly dropped it in his eagerness to get the phone to his ear, and he was already pushing the button to accept the call as his eyes processed that it wasn’t an incoming call. It was a text message from Karen’s number.