Written for Hogwarts' Auction Challenge: First Line: It had to be around here somewhere.
(Abby, I hate you. I cried like three times writing this.)
Word count: 406
here in this room (chasing down my demons)
It had to be around here somewhere. Panic clawed at his throat as he pushed his arm deeper into the drawer. He couldn't open it entirely — he never had been able to, the wood was twisted somehow — and he felt the wood scrape painfully against his knuckles, but Sammy didn't care.
It had to be around here somewhere. He knew it was. He remembered tossing it there, drunk and angry and scared, and — yes, there it was.
His fingers brushed against cool, smooth metal, and from there on out, it was only a matter of seconds before he had fished out what he'd been looking for.
The air stung painfully on his hand where he had torn the skin away, but it was all too easy to ignore.
The ring looked so small in his hands, so innocuous, but Sammy breathed a sigh of relief at the sight anyway, suddenly feeling like he could breathe at last.
(Golden, and always able to make him feel better, and hadn't that been Jack all along?)
He didn't put it on, though.
He hadn't, not since Jack had left, had vanished like he had never been there in the first place.
He hadn't even really worn it before then either, though — never outside, never where anyone could see (and they weren't married yet anyway, but one day they would have been, one fucking day they would have been), but he had worn the ring inside their home, and he had liked it.
The weight of it had been… grounding, almost, and and Sammy wanted that — except that he knew putting on the right would mean remembering, more than he already did, and he didn't think his heart could handle that at the moment. Or ever.
(Sammy had been the one to propose, in one of those rare moments where he felt like maybe, one day, he wouldn't hate himself so much.
It had taken him two hours to convince Jack that he wouldn't regret asking in the morning — because he had had one beer, yes, but he also wanted this and he knew (hoped) that Jack did too, even if they had never truly officially talked about it.
Two days later, Jack had surprised him with a ring — because Sammy hadn't actually dared to buy those, but Jack had always been braver than him.)