I love Happy Quinn with my entire heart, but I felt incredibly angst-y today and couldn't help this. I tried to make it as Toby-like as I could!
Alcohol didn't help. The liquid dripping down his throat was only numb against everything else constricting the inside his body. Usually it left at least some sort of burning or tingling. But not now.
His eyes stung with thick tears of grief. Those were the worst kind. Ones that were like razorblades cascading down his face, unable to stop flowing out, each one leaving a sticky trail in its wake. But they didn't hurt as badly as the throbbing in his chest.
Toby took another long gulp from the bottle in his hands.
He'd lost track of how long he'd been sitting here, staring at the dull slab of marble. The words etched into the front side only served as a reminder of what he'd lost, not a symbol of respect like they should've.
Happy Quinn-friend, daughter, wife.
God. A few more months and it would've read mother, too.
He'd been itching to get to the nearest casino. And if the pain hadn't been so damn overwhelming, he just might've.
When was the last time he'd felt anything else besides pain?
That's what it was. Raw, ruthless, pain eating away at every small shred of happiness that'd spent years building up, its teeth sharp as it continued to gnaw. Dictating his every move, tainting every individual thought with bereavement.
It all hurt so bad he really wished he'd died, too.
It would've been better than this. Better than his heart being torn from his chest, crushed into millions of pieces before his eyes.
Those pieces were gone. Lost to the void of grief, and they would never come back. He'd never be whole.
His heart was buried in there with her.
He was drowning. Had been drowning under the waves of intense sorrow for three straight days. He hadn't felt himself breathe once. It'd all just been too much.
Every time he closed his eyes, he pictured her lying in his arms, the warm tendrils of her blood twisting around his numb fingers. The memory opened up the mournful wound, rubbing the inside with salt over and over again and stinging so much he'd actually started to get used to it by now.
And then the tears came faster, blindingly faster, blurring the view of the gravestone from his vision.
Toby viciously wiped the back of his hand against his eyes.
He swallowed another mouthful of his tequila.
His chest ached intensely.
The life had been completely drained from his body, leaving him an empty shell of misery and a lot of fucking pain, hollowed out by all the anguish and mercilessly brutal grief.
The image of her face was still lifelike in his mind, but it simultaneously felt like a distant memory, one just barely out of his reach, just barely past the stretch of his fingertips, leaving the sickeningly deep pit in his stomach to keep digging further in.
It'd been three days since her life ended. And three days since his did.
There'd been no logical state of mind left, no joy, no jokes cracked, nothing except layer upon layer of pain and more pain that solidified its thickly embedded roots with each passing second.
She was his whole goddamn world. He'd been madly in love with her for years. And for those years she'd consumed his first and last thought of every day. Hell, she'd consumed most of his daily thoughts.
She'd been his everything.
She had left her touch on every part of his life. He was a god damn dumpster fire before she had made everything good. What the hell was he supposed to go back to?
And now he was just completely empty yet simultaneously still dying inside and god, everything had gone to hell. Everything had just shattered. His whole universe shattered.
The tears started to come faster.
"Toby?" He didn't raise his head after Paige suddenly stepped behind him. When she spoke, her voice had an outer shell of softness, but it still retained a deeper sadness and fatigue behind it. "What are you still doing here?"
"What do you think?" he muttered without turning around.
"Honestly," she said slowly, "I think that you need to go home. Wash off the funeral and alcohol."
Toby gripped the bottle tighter. "I can't go home."
"Well, you can't stay here, either."
Tilting his bottle upwards, he threw back another swig of tequila. And then he took a hard swallow, an attempt to diminish the ensuing hoarseness in his voice. He failed, and his words emerged like ragged shards of glass slicing through the air. "Did you know she was pregnant?"
Paige paused. Her entire demeanor instantly shifted. "What?"
Toby firmly ground the heels of his hands into his eyes. "She was pregnant, Paige. We-" his voice cracked, "we were gonna start a family."
She slowly dropped to her knees on his left. He didn't even have to look at her to know her heart had just broken more than it did throughout the past few days. "...Oh my god..." she breathed, "...Toby..."
He couldn't stop his crying even if he wanted to. The sight of the grave before him was clouded with thick beads of tears pooling in his eyes.
This was where the love of his life would lay for eternity. This was where the baby that he never got to meet would lay. The wife he would never touch again. Never kiss again. Never hold again. Never see again. Never get to tell he loved her again. And it was quickly just becoming too fucking much. He couldn't feel himself breath anymore as the sobs gushed out, as the pain pulsed in his veins harder than the blood did. So much pain had slithered into his heart, and it was achingly deteriorating from the inside out. And it was just becoming too fucking much. "I can't believe she's gone, Paige. I-I can't believe they're gone."
Paige wrapped her nearest arm around his shoulders. She was crying, too. It wasn't as bad as him, but she was crying. "Toby...I'm so sorry."
Toby couldn't feel any of his other senses. It was all just grief, sorrow, and a lot of pain. And that was it.
It was all just pain.