Title: Splash
Rating: T
Genre: Angst
Spoilers: "Untethered", particularly Bobby's last conversation with Frank.
A/N: This abstract, darker than my usual, and very short. OOC? Eh. You decide.
Summary: He has nightmares now, but they're not over the things the department shrink warned him about. Post-Ep for Untethered.
He has nightmares now, but they're not over the things the department shrink warned him about. (Never about those things, never. Never what anyone expected. Not in all the long years.) When his eyes close at night, he doesn't feel the restraints against his wrists. His stomach doesn't tighten, doesn't strain against the memory of that cold chain strapped tight across his skin. There aren't screams ringing in his ears, and there's no aching churning in his gut that makes him want to cry tears he doesn't have for the water they're not going to bring him. (His bad dreams were never about hiding in the dark behind locked closet doors, shaking and trying not to make a sound. Never about a monster chasing him through the halls, screaming frenzied threats from frothing lips, then pleading, pleading with him, as if he could ever be anyone's salvation, at twelve or fifteen, or forty three.) No. When the darkness closes in over his head, Bobby doesn't fall into a world of harsh florescent lights, and the cries of the damned tucked away behind bars. Instead, behind his eyelids, the image of his brother's face flickers across a blank screen.
(Instead, there were her eyes, dark and still in the calm of some storm that never left. And then they'd close, slow and drifting, and he knew, knew they were never going to open again. The smell of her perfume, and his father's cologne, long lost.)
And he hears a call, quiet and far below him, before the river sweeps the sound away, and he waits, waits, waits--
But never hears the splash.
fin.
Be a friend and tell me what you think?