csi_sanders1129 | Fic: Before It's Too Late

Title: Before It’s Too Late
Chapters: 3/?
Author:

csi_sanders1129
Genre: Drama. Suspense. Angst. Hurt/Comfort.
Ratings: T
Word Count: 1,500
Pairings/Characters: Jason Morgan/Damian Spinelli
Synopsis: PCPD Officers have just been called to Port Charles University. Sources have informed us that an armed man has barricaded himself inside a classroom. Attempts to contact the gunman for negotiations have thus far been unsuccessful. More at 9.
Comments: Rated for what could be considered triggering topics. Written on request from

suerum . Fic is… almost completed, but I thought I’d start posting it to motivate myself to keep working on it. OC’s are mine, whether or not I want them, GH characters are not. Reviews are awesome. Enjoy!

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 |

Richard was pacing like a caged animal, back and forth along the front row of the classroom. He was muttering to himself and casting suspicious glances at his well-panicked captives.

This, Spinelli knew, was not shaping up to end well.

"Er, excuse me, Richard, is it not?" He forced himself to say. Talking was nearly impossible given that his heart seemed to have taken up residence somewhere in his throat, but someone had to do something. He swallowed and pushed his chair back so that he could stand up, watching the gunman carefully.

The gun was aimed at him, then. "What the hell do you want?"

"Ugh, the Jackal must first say that this is a most disconcerting position to be in and if you would just kindly angle… No. O-okay." The look on their captor's face pretty much guaranteed that that wasn't going to happen. "Well, then. Alright. The Jackal, that is I, was just wondering what it is you intend to do here?"

Richard's eyes narrowed upon the stupid boy brazen enough to question him. "Yeah, yeah. I'll tell you." He said with a kind of incredulous, if slightly insane, laugh. "I," the gun moved off of Spinelli and to the girl sitting at the other end of his row. "Hmm, what am I going to do with you all?" Then it moved to the two brothers who sat behind her, and then onto each and every other student in the room as he spoke. "I'm going to shoot each and every one of you in your talented little heads." By then, the gun had refocused itself on Spinelli, who was still standing. "That sound good?"

Spinelli paled, as did everyone else in the room. "A logical mind such as yours must realize that such actions are not going to accomplish anything." He gestured around the room. "In harming us, which, I pointedly add, you haven't done yet, how do you imagine that you'll get out of here?"

The armed man shook his head, and the rather chilling reply to Spinelli's inquiry came to light. "What makes you think I have plans to get out?"

This, Spinelli realized, only served to make talking his opponent down all the more essential. It meant they all had a whole lot more to lose in the event that shots started firing. If Richard's view of all this was not promptly changed, none of them would likely be walking out of here. None of them would be seeing their families or their friends ever again. He would not be seeing his family again. He wouldn't be seeing his friends again. He wouldn't be seeing Jason – whom he counted among both groups – again.

"Surely only a prideless coward would make such plans." Spinelli said, his own eyes focusing past the barrel of the gun and instead on its wielder. "Slaying 13 people in cold blood holds no purpose for you. You want revenge, do you not, upon Professor Killian for failing you? – However justly or unjustly he did so. But in situations such as this, it is not the killer who earns the sympathy of those in the public, but the victims. The one responsible is at best labeled a troubled, unstable youth, and at worst, a murderous, malevolent monster."

Richard was literally shaking with anger over Spinelli's comments. Lip curled upwards in a vicious snarl, eyes narrowed pointedly at the audacious student willing to say such things. The meaning behind the words did nothing, only aggravated him further. "You do realize that I'm the one with the gun, don't you?" He spat furiously.

Spinelli nodded. "It is, shall we say, not the Jackal's first time in such a situation." Granted, typically, in other instances in which guns were present, so was Jason. Which wasn't the case here. "Truly, I can assure you that actions such as those you are contemplating are not worth it in the end."

"What do you know?" The gunman scoffed. "You don't know anything about me, what I'm dealing with. All because of him." The gun rotated to face the professor once again. "He ruined my life, so now I'll ruin his. His and yours."

"The Jackal-" Spinelli began again, but then there were gunshots that seemed ten thousand times louder than any Spinelli had ever heard. All he could do in the instant the attack began was freeze in place as Professor Killian fell. The reality of what was occurring hit him abruptly and it was all he could do to remember to get out of the way. He saw two other classmates fall in the hail of bullets, the two brothers in the row behind him, and then the girl to his side followed just seconds later.

He was almost out of range, almost on the floor, when a piercing pain – so much worse than the accidental wound he'd managed to inflict upon himself - shot through his chest. There was another in his arm.

Despite the pain, agonizing as it was, and the fact that breath was coming harder and harder to him, he was as still as possible where he dropped. A short moment later, there was one more shot, and Richard fell, too.

"What were you thinking! You completely clueless idiot! What were you trying to do!" These were Jason's words upon hearing the audio of the moments leading up to the gunfire. He meant none of them, but the sheer panic of not knowing what had happened inside, just knowing that it involved bullets in way too close of a proximity to Spinelli, was enough to seriously distress him.

Mac, still standing beside him and now listening in real time for any sounds from the gunman, turned to regard him calmly, as if nothing was wrong. "Gotta give the kid credit for thinking on his feet." He said, and he sounded almost proud.

Pride he would feel eventually, too, Jason figured. What Spinelli had done had certainly been brave. There was no denying that. But, if it had gotten him killed then it would not be pride Jason would be dealing with, rather devastation. The only way to know was to see for himself. He took off toward the doors quickly, but not quickly enough.

Mac caught his arm before he'd gotten very far at all - and really it just seemed to get farther and farther away from him with every step he took."Jason! Jason, stop! We still don't know if it's secure." Mac said, motioning two officers over to aid him in the efforts that restraining Jason would surely entail. "We don't know who was shot."

It was then that the previously barricaded doors flew open and a couple of students raced out. Some had stayed behind to check the injured, they reported, and the gunman was down, they said. But Jason was not happy to see that Spinelli wasn't among those escaping.

In the mass chaos that ensued with the student's escape, and with the officers rushing in to clear the building, Jason slipped away from the officers Mac had left him with and made it into the building without much by way of obstruction. It wasn't hard to find the room, either. One of the escaping students must have run through a pool of blood in their haste to get away. It was simple enough to back-track the trail of footprints.

He was not the first to get to the room, though. A handful of officers dressed in bullet proof gear were pulling the rest of the uninjured students away from the fallen, sending them out of the building, but Jason's focus was solely on Spinelli.

Spinelli. Spinelli lying on the ground, in a puddle of his own blood. There was a gash along his arm – that was the first thing Jason had seen, as the younger had landed on his side. As he drew nearer, around the side of the table to drop to his knees beside Spinelli's prone form, he saw the second wound in his chest.

He was reaching out before he ever realized he was moving, his fingers landing against Spinelli's neck and searching in desperate hope for a pulse. "Spinelli, come on." He said, mostly to himself, as he cared not who else heard him. Blood was soaking into his jeans where he kneeled beside his wounded protégé, but that was hardly his concern. "Damn it, Spinelli, stay."

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he registered that the officers checking the other victims were not finding many positive results. They'd given up on two of the three other students (the third, one of the two brothers, was still dubiously alive) and the professor who had taken fire, and for a moment he feared that the unthinkable might happen. That Spinelli might be similarly given up on. But there was a beat, slow and not terribly regular, under Jason's fingers.

"Hey, over here!" Jason declared, as he moved instead to grip Spinelli's hand.

Within moments, paramedics had shooed him away from Spinelli.