Today's a reason for living. Who: National Security (absolutecontrol) and US Military (pro_patria) What: Ryan's been AWOL. Jamie drops by his place. Where: Ryan's apartment. When: Friday night. Warnings: None.
"Mark! MARK! Are you okay? What're we gonna do?"
Blurry vision - it was hot; so hot. There was noise and chaos and screaming and gunfire everywhere. He couldn't remember why his vision was blurry in the first place - did he suffer a blow to the head? Had he been shot? He could feel the blood on his face but he wasn't sure if it was his own blood or someone else's.
"MARK!"
Mark. Mark Forrester. That was his name.
"Y-yeah?"
The young man screaming out his name pulled him down back into the safety of the trenches as an explosion too close for comfort rang impossibly loud in his ears.
"Brian."
"That's right - that's right, I'm Brian. How many fingers am I holding up?"
"Wha- Two? Why are you askin-"
"Okay. It's okay; no time to explain. We're in the crossfire and we need to get moving."
Brian wasn't even twenty. The boy always said he wanted to go to college after his time was done serving the military - 'get a degree and a proper job like my pa wants me to'.
Military could remember countless thousands who were just like Brian - too reckless to serve, too ignorant to be involved and far too young for Military to be telling their families that this was the last thing their sons wrote before he died in battle. Brian was but one face that was engraved into the memory of then-Mark, now-Ryan, and as the death toll climbed, the hauntings increased in number, in frequency, in the torment they inflicted on him.
Most of the time, Military hadn't been personally involved in the war. He experienced it through the people who fought; saw things soldiers saw, heard things they heard and lived their lives in their hell. He was completely exhausted and passed out on his bed in his apartment in New York, and in his unconscious state he could hear the soldiers in Afghanistan talking about cheeseburger cravings and girlfriends back home.
For this very reason - be it living someone else's war horrors or reliving his own - he had been avoiding sleep. Now they were happening frequent enough that he was having episodes in the middle of the day. Ryan hadn't left his apartment or talked to anyone since Fight Club at Christmas; he was trapped in his house, trapped in visions and memories that did not belong to him, and he was trapped in his own head.
His hands were shaking, and he couldn't stop the trembles even as he dug his fingers into his damp bedsheets and gripped into them as hard as he could. There were empty pill bottles sharing his bed, and a few pills scattered on top of the mattress.
The thought of calling someone crossed his mind. All he ended up doing was leaving missed calls on various warmongers' phones - or maybe he'd just been calling and hanging up on the same person a few times over - and tossing his flat-battery phone off the bed. It was probably on the floor somewhere alongside the heaps of dirty clothes and broken glass.
Too noisy. Too guilty. Even if God could help him, he didn't think he deserved it.