The building was old and he should’ve known better.
Which, point in fact, wasn’t really saying anything at all. He’d done dumber things than walking around on the roof of an abandoned building at three in the morning, but he was actually paying the consequences for it for once, and that made it a far stupider idea in retrospect.
He’d slipped.
That hadn’t been a big deal. He’d caught himself before he was even near the edge, though the roof tiles were slick with rain, and he’d pulled himself back, half-laughing with the adrenalin rush. He was fine.
But he’d stood without thinking.
It surprised him, the not thinking. He hadn’t realized he was jittery from his close call. Yet he’d scrambled to his feet, a yard or more away from the roof supports he’d been careful to stay on, before he even stopped to reconsider his decision.
The first thing he noticed was that the roof was sagging. The second was that it wasn’t, that there was, in fact, a collapsing hole where he was standing. For one very long moment time seemed to slow and freeze, tiles falling and shattering with no sound, as he stood suspended in open space. He didn’t need to be psychic to know that he was screwed.
The sound came back on, and like a switch had been flipped, gravity grabbed him by the feet and pulled, leaving his stomach near the roof. Feet struck one floor with a shattering impact, but he was already through the rotting floor, old boards grabbing and tearing at his arms before he could scream. He crashed through another floor, hit like an anvil to the chest and suddenly he couldn’t breathe and please, please, somebody, anybody, help how many floors are left but no one knows where…
His head cracked once, loudly, with a sound he would never remember hearing, neck jerking forward and sharply, mercifully, the world went black.
~ * * * ~
Gus looked over at the clock next to his head and groaned. Six AM. Six. Bloody. AM. Three hours of sleep. Three, flipping, hours of sleep because some idiot kept calling him to try and get him to do something stupid. What on God’s green earth could have convinced Shawn calling him to do something at one in the morning was a good idea?
Was it related to their current case? Sort of. Sort of? Sort of?! They’d been running around willy nilly until midnight when Gus had demanded to go home. 12:30 and he’d finally reached home, and half an hour later Shawn was calling him because he “sort of” had something related to their current case. Gus hung up.
Actually, he hung up seven times. Lucky number eight he didn’t pick up. Lucky number nine was from his house phone, for a change of pace, and Shawn was through 92 bottles of beer on the answering machine before Gus finally put his foot down.
Figuratively speaking. He’d picked up the phone, snarled something unintelligible and slammed the phone back in the cradle before he could hear Shawn laughing at him. He’d turned off his cell phone, unplugged his land line, double-locked his front door, and locked all the windows, praying that he wouldn’t wake up to the sound of breaking glass fifteen minutes later.
He was lucky, somehow, impossibly so, and instead of breaking glass it was his alarm that woke him up three hours later.
Gus groaned again and blinked at his clock. Somewhere in the last ten seconds it had jumped to 6:05. If he didn’t get up now he would never make it to work. He crawled sullenly out of the warm sheets and staggered to the shower, glad that he hadn’t given Shawn the chance to tell him where he’d gone.
Friggin’, idiot, best friend would probably have convinced him to come.