Shane Marion (wolfishane) wrote in bellumlogs, @ 2010-02-21 23:10:00 |
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Entry tags: | big bad wolf |
Who: Shane (closed, narrative)
What: Shane's head is not a happy place to be these days.
Where: Outside Bellum
When: After this.
Warnings: Blood mentions, the usual.
After killing a man in an alleyway and saving another man's life by that turn, Shane went for a very long walk and smoked several cigarettes.
He'd been smoking more since he'd assured Boyd he'd give up killing. Boyd. What would she think? Would she be angry? Would she listen long enough to hear him out? He hadn't meant to. He was trying not to. It was like he couldn't escape it, no matter how hard he tried to get away from it.
He'd barely spoken to Boyd since Valentine's Day. He didn't know what to say to her. She was in love with someone else (or she loved him, but were the two all that different?) and he didn't know what to do to change that. It seemed his only hope of keeping her rested in 'getting better,' but that was so nebulous, so incredible a concept, that it felt hopeless.
Despondent. That was how he'd felt over the past week. He'd laid out all his options, each less likely than the last. He'd considered, for about two seconds, trying to find a psychiatrist who would truly stick to patient confidentiality, but it seemed like too much of a risk. Even if it wasn't, it had been a long time since he'd trusted members of the psychiatric profession. When he was nine, the court-ordered therapist he'd seen had written him off as mentally sound after what had happened to his family, happy to get one more case off of his overloaded books without doing any actual digging at all. Useless.
There was no one he could talk to aside from Boyd. He was lucky that she was still around, frankly. He'd done nothing but bring her misery--first her family, and now as some sort of a sick burden she felt she had to carry around. For the past week, it had been eating at him. He wasn't good enough. He never had been, and she'd just been too kind to tell him so. He didn't know how to make her happy, how to comfort her, how to please her--not in bed, not in conversation. He was pitiful as far as boyfriends went. A failure.
And now his only chance at redeeming himself, making her happy, lay in doing something he had no idea how to do. He'd believed, for a long time, that he had a purpose. He knew what he was in this world to do, and he did it, and that was the end of his thoughts on the matter. Now that purpose seemed murky, clouded with doubt. Now that he'd let doubt in, it dogged him; whether or not any of it had really ever been about making things better, the way he'd meant for it to be, or whether it had just been about him and lashing out and finding a way to get some peace and quiet in his head no matter what it took. Killing was a balm on him. It was all he knew how to do, what he was good at. If he admitted it, he couldn't really imagine what life would be without it.
He knew what life had been these past few months, but all of that had rested on Boyd. Every time something stung him, left him blind with want, Boyd had been there. Now she was growing tired of throwing herself in front of that, and he only wondered why he hadn't seen it before. She shouldn't have to.
And so he was left at an impasse. Because he was incapable of loving her the way she deserved, Boyd had fallen in love with someone else. Could he ever catch up to that? Could he ever find a way to bridge that chasm of confusion and misunderstanding, born of most of a lifetime without ever really knowing what being cared for and caring for someone else was about?
He didn't know. But he had to try. Because he meant what he'd told Boyd--he didn't know what he would do without her.
He knew what he had to do, however. He would try to get better. Somehow. And then, when the basis of their relationship no longer rested on shouldering the burden of keeping him from killing, he could tell Boyd that, if she wanted to, she was free to go.
He hoped she would say no, when he asked her. But if she said yes, at least she'd be happy. Maybe she'd find someone capable. Maybe she'd find someone better at living, and not as good at death.