All-consuming pain
Character: Brady Setting: His room, afternoon
Brady was in quite a state by the time he left Edan in the courtyard and finally made it back to his room. He was pissed at himself for having told her things that he'd managed to keep to himself for so fucking long. How the hell had those things slipped out? How the fuck had she managed to crack him open and get him to bare his broken soul for her to see? And God-fucking-damnit, why the hell did she have to say the things she'd said. Her and Autumn both. He was broken, shattered, irrepairable. He was dangerous and had no future to look toward.
There were some people here who deserved a second chance at life, Edan and Autumn both he considered as part of that catergory, but he was not one of them. No matter how many excuses there were for why it wasn't his fault, Brady knew that it was. It wasn't just Iraq. There was something wrong with him. To the core wrong. It was his greatest fear, that his father had passed along all the wrong genes onto him. Given enough time, all those traits would have trickled out of him, and he'd have done so much more damage than he had, which was saying something considering how much damage he'd managed to do.
He dropped down onto his couch, tossing his boxes carelessly next to him and flinging an arm over his eyes. He was fucking spiraling. He could feel it, but he was powerless to stop it. He had to fucking try, though, he thought as he abruptly jumped up from the couch, bouncing in place for a minute before pacing, rubbing his hands over his head.
"Just gotta get outta my fucking head," Brady muttered as he paced.
There was no way just pacing and telling himself to get out of his head was going to do the trick, though, and the need to just do something had him tearing the tape off his packages. He didn't even give the clothes a moment's consideration beyond recognizing that they were clothes, tossing the box aside and moving onto the next. What he found there had his heart dropping clear to his toes.
"Fuck," he breathed, lifting what was clearly a photo album out of the box with hands that were shaky at best. He didn't want to see what was surely inside. That didn't stop his hand from traitoriously lifting the cover. His fingertips trailed over the first picture. Madelyn, all prettied up in a pink frilly dress, her hair curled, fingernails polished, smiling at the camera as if she hadn't a care in the world. She wore a birthday girl crown. Five years old now. She just had her birthday a couple weeks ago, something he'd tried desperately not to think about. He was missing so much.
A strangled sob sounded in his throat, and he had to press his fingers against his eyes to keep the moisture there from spilling over. And then a fierce anger rose up in him, all the things that he'd failed to cohesively express to Autumn and Edan flying through his mind. He screamed, a broken and furious sound, throwing the album away from him. As painful as it was to see a picture of Madelyn, he knew it would be even more so to see Michael's aged image. He would look so different now. And God-fucking-damnit if he didn't just want to hold his kids right then, just smell that perfect powdery kid smell, hear those existence-reaffirming heartbeats, and know that they were all right.
He would never be able to again, though. It was a futile desire, one he'd thought he'd buried deep enough so as not to torment himself with it, but his conversations of late had put such heavy cracks in his shields that he was vulnerable and unable to stop the thoughts, the desires. It made him want to punch something, to hurt something else as much as he was hurting in that moment. He nearly did punch the wall, but ended up merely hitting it with the side of his balled fist, another strangled sob escaping his lips as he realized that there were tear tracks on his cheeks. His forehead rested against the cool wall, his hands pressing against paint as he tried to think, to remember the encouraging words of two women who owed him nothing, who had no reason to want to save him from himself.
By the time Brady pushed away from the wall, the tears had stopped, and he wiped his hands over his face before turning to his computer. He had to get this shit out of his head or it would utterly consume him, and then he would do something stupid.