Title: Fracture
During the movie, Barney tells Gunnar that he can't trust Gunnar now that he's "using again" -implying he'd used before and that he'd stopped before. It made me wonder just how many times that cycle had repeated itself, and I came up with this.
ONE:
The psychiatrist had started off okay, Barney Ross remembered vaguely. Gunnar had stopped using –it had shown in the twitch of his hands- and had made an honest effort to sort himself out. Hadn't talked much about it –fair enough- but had mumbled indistinctly about trauma and coping mechanisms.
Pretty much the same bucket load of issues as everyone else, he'd thought. They'd all thought it, really. Sometimes, when all that stuff –all those things that they saw and did and didn't do- crept up on you, kept you up at night, kept you at the bar when every rational part of you told you to just go home... Everyone did stupid shit when that happened. He did, Christmas did, Yang and Toll Road and Hale Caesar did... they all did, at some point or another.
Problem was, it was only supposed to happen once –maybe twice- and then that was it. The mind unscrambled itself and the hangover kicked in, and the rational, sensible side took over again. That was okay. That was normal. Even normal civvies messed themselves up like that, sometimes, when their issues got too big and too hard to beat.
The thing about the Expendables was that they were supposed to bounce back.
... But Gunnar didn't.
Well, he did, at first. He bounced back with a couple of drinks and maybe a pissing contest or two –par for the course with this lot of his, Barney acknowledged- but then whatever part of Gunnar's mind that kept him bouncing back better than before... it just broke.
Like when a bad engine breaks down in the middle of fucking nowhere and there's nothing around you for miles but sand and dirt and flies.
Maybe that's what it was like for the giant Swede –nothing but a goddamn wasteland wherever he looked.
Maybe that's what it's like for all of them.
But Gunnar broke, and not one of them had a clue how, or why, or what from. In the end, it didn't matter. There was always something. Some kid got killed in front of him, maybe, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or a woman, like it was with Tool, up and died in some senseless way that shouldn't have meant anything but rattled him like it meant everything. Or maybe it was some self-loathing, some bone-deep sense of worthlessness, like what Toll Road never quite hid with his cauliflower ear rant and his angry, avoidant issues. Hell, it could have been a woman –wife, girlfriend, whatever- like Christmas.
Whatever it was, it climbed up over that mountain of all the crazy, horrible things that had ever happened to him –to any of them- and broke him like so much glass.
Yeah, Barney remembered, the psychiatrist had started off okay –a slow, but steady approach- but then Gunnar went and fell off the wagon.
A relapse.
It was the money problems that had done it, that time –that much, Barney knew- but Gunnar's solution only made it worse and worse and worse.
But he never asked for money, not from any of them. Not ever. Too proud. Too stubborn.
Too goddamn mulish to ever ask for help.
But the psychiatrist had started off okay –and that meant that maybe, just maybe, there was hope.