"His daddy didn't beat him."

"And I got angry. That boy had a good house, a good family. The sort I would have killed for…"

-(4.2, Chapter 41)

The first time his father turned on him, he was six. The slap had his ears ringing till dinner. When he looked in the mirror, there was a matching red mark on his cheek, and he'd stared in wonder at how large the hand was compared to his own. A handprint bruise bloomed on his forearm where he'd grabbed him and he wore it like a battle scar.

The first time he came away with a broken nose, he was eight. He'd had all the grandiose bravery and recklessness of a child who had yet to learn how much the world could hurt.

Rage had slashed his back to ribbons for the first time when he was thirteen. After that, his father would take a kind of glee in regularly lashing his back bloody with his worn belt. He had talked back too much and too loudly. It cost him, but the wrath only hardened his bravery. And his hatred for the half-man who had sired him.

At fifteen, he broke his first bones. Coming home to see his mother curled into herself against a wall, half-conscious with blood running down her face was more than he was willing to bare. Rage exploded inside him and he threw himself at his father, who had his mother's blood still fresh and sticky on his knuckles. His father had answered back with his own blows while his mother screamed at them to stop. Neither heard her. That night, he resolved he would never see someone he loved suffer and watch in silence. At church that Sunday, he absorbed the pity and distaste in his neighbors' eyes as they saw his mother's face. No doubt they thought her weak, deserving of what most of them saw as punishment, not a tyrant's rage. They said nothing except quietly behind their hands to each other, did nothing. Spineless bastards, all of them.

At eighteen, he went off to the Sentinel with the picture of his father and a white-robed Klansman hidden in the bottom of his suitcase. He'd scarcely known such a mix of pride and loathing that settled like a stone in his gut. For once in his miserable life, his father had done whatever he had to for his family, and sometimes the end justified the measures. He donned his cadet uniform and suffered through Knob summer with enough pride to eat down to his bones. His mother would cry to see him in uniform when he came home to visit, and his father would slap him on the back in an alien gesture of mangled affection. Neither of them had gone to college, and they couldn't fathom how high above Gaffney, South Carolina his ambitions reached.

He stood next to his father's graveside at twenty, solitary except for the pastor and the corpse. His father had had no good qualities and very few palatable ones. He couldn't fault his mother for her absence; he would have persuaded her to stay home, far away from this mess, if she hadn't on her own.

One night when he was twenty-four, he sat in the Harvard cafeteria, and Claire laughed as he went for a third plate. Before their wedding vows, before they were even considering marriage, Claire made him a promise.

When he was twenty-five, he buried his head against Claire's shoulder, letting the tears filled with hate and fear and inexplicable longing slip down his face. His fingers dug into her skin hard enough to bruise, as if she could keep him sane, protect him from the cocktail of pride and loathing that felt like it was eating him inside. Fix the jolt of horror and disgust and rage when he remembered his mother on her knees like that in front of his father with her head wrenched bank - the way she had been crying. And Claire had held him back just as tightly, murmuring with her breath warm and soft against his ear as she tenderly stroked his hair, until his body stopped shaking and his sobs quieted. She understood.

Close only counts in horse shoes and hand grenades...