Disclamer: Don't own them, just playing with them
A/N: This is something that was stuck in my head for a while so I decided to finally write it. I know it's short but this is just the begining
Five Stages
Prologue
First time you met grief was when your mother died, but you were too young to know anything about it, let alone recognize it and know it's name. Second time you saw it was in your father's eyes. You wondered when it would go away, but it stayed. Since then you saw it constantly, everytime your family moved, everytime you failed to save someone, or when Sam and dad were fighting. You learned to live with it, always aware of it's shadow, knowing it could resurface any second and the only trail of it's wake would be the pain, regrets and empty wishes you knew would never come true. You never tried to do research about it, why bother when you know that there won't be any information on how to kill it, because you can't kill an emotion. So you just accepted it's existance and tried to avoid it at any cost, but it still finds you every once in a while.
When you were twelve, you saw a six year old girl being killed by a black dog because you failed to protect her, because you thought you two could get away unnoticed. You were wrong and the price was the girl's life. This time grief was in your eyes, and it was unbearable, but it was nothing compared to the pain that followed her. Pain from knowing that it was all your fault. After that you thought you could find a way to control grief or at least the pain that came after her. For the first you never found a way, but you did for the second. You built walls around yourself to protect you from any feelings, not just grief. You didn't do that because of fear but because it was necessary in order to save lives without feelings clouding your judgement like they did that day the little girl died.
That was ten years ago and your walls were still in place. What the walls of Alcatraz represented to it's inmates, yours represented for any outside feelings, and sometimes even your own. From time to time you would lower them for your dad or brother, when you thought that seeing 'something' in your eyes would make them feel better, or convince them that you were alright. But those times were few and very far in between.
Occasionally a few minor cracks would appear and you'd fix them, but first you tried to find out the reason for their appearing so that you could ecsape the next time. But there were two cracks you could never fix even though you knew the reasons behind. Those reasons were Dad and Sammy. You tried everything to fix them completely, but they were always there, in all their glory, sometimes smaller, sometimes bigger. You knew that in the end, those cracks would shatter the walls and cause your downfall.
But you didn't know it would be so soon.