Note: Just a random idea that came to me last night. There will be a couple more parts to this. Hope you enjoy.
As a child Perry Cox wanted to hate his father. He wanted to hate him so badly. He wanted to hate him for all the times he had beaten him with a leather belt because he'd dropped a bottle of milk or forgotten to walk the dog or because his baseball team had lost or just because he felt like it.
He wanted to hate him for making him watch as Paige was beaten with the same belt, for making her cry out to him for help and for making him feel so helpless because he couldn't stop his sister's screams.
He wanted to hate him but as a child all Perry Cox felt was fear.
As an adult Perry Cox hated his father.
College was his escape. Finally he could leave that house and never look back. He moved to the other side of the country, he cut himself off from his family, even Paige, and that should have been the end of it. It should have been the start of his new life. But every time he took a shower he was confronted with the scars and he knew he would never be free of that man; the man who should have been a Dad. The man who betrayed everything the word father was supposed to stand for.
The day he realised that was the day that he realised that he hated his father.
He was in his first year of Residency at Sacred Heart when he got the call; a car accident, driving while drunk, might not make it through the night.
Perry went to the hospital in Pittsburgh, expecting death himself to be waiting by his father's bedside.
He wasn't.
His father was sitting up in bed, awake and as far from death as it was possible to be. Miraculous recovery, his doctor called it.
Perry wanted to scream. He wanted to rage. He wanted to punch the wall.
Every day he saw good people dying. Innocent children who'd never done anything wrong were taken from this world and bastards like him got to live on. He got to look death in the face and laugh. How was that right? How was that fair? Why did he get the medical miracle while other people died from complications of minor surgery?
Sitting in the corridor outside his father's room, Perry knew he could do it. He was a doctor. It would be so easy to just overdose his father with medication; maybe an injection of drugs would do it, the world would thank him for it in the end, especially when they gave consent to donate all his father's organs; heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, pancreas. How many lives could be saved if his father's life ended? It would be so easy.
But then Perry went back into the room and looked at the pitiful sight in front of him; his mother, holding his father's hand looking at him with such devotion – the same devotion that allowed her to turn a blind eye while he beat ten bells out of her children.
His father gazed at him with that same look of superiority and disdain that he'd always had. When Perry had been a child, that look had sent fear to his very soul but looking at his father now, he realised he felt nothing; no emotion at all, not even hate.
That man in the bed was too pathetic for death. Death was too good for him.
Perry turned and walked out the door, out of the hospital and headed straight back to California.
Perry always thought that when the day finally came, that he would celebrate by dancing on his father's grave. But three years later when the cancer finally took him Perry didn't even go to the funeral.
