Title: This Skin
Author: Shay (jracklesfan77)
Genre: Angst, General
Rating: G
Word count: 615
A/N: Written for the October Word Prompt. Words used: Mask, Voices and Why.
Summary: He masks the chaos and confusion with a smile.
This Skin
Accusations constantly rang in his head. Be it real or imagined, it seemed that now he had an extra burden to carry; one of guilt by association.
Just by being a product of Manticore he felt responsible for their actions, even when these actions weren't his own. He seemed to always be fighting faceless, nameless ghosts, battling his way through a tunnel of cobwebbed confusion that tangled within his mind. This was in addition to the horrors he had actually experienced and the flashbacks he routinely suffered. His conscience didn't seem to differentiate between the actual and the perceived when it came to inflicting guilt.
Why was it that the world of dreams could no longer offer the peace, solace and safety it had in his younger years? Possibly because with age came experience and obligations - and with those, accountability.
Responsibility never weighed so heavily upon him as it had in the aftermath of Manticore's destruction.
The things he had done - deaths and devastation wrought by his own hand - those he understood. Those ghosts, those faces, and those voices he knew or recognized, for those he accepted the responsibility and the guilt that accompanied it.
But it was the things he'd never seen, places he'd never been and people he had never met haunting him and attacking his conscience that he just couldn't quite understand. Why did his awakened humanity condemn him to the gut wrenching feeling of culpability even when he wasn't at fault? Sometimes he hated Max for raising these feelings within him.
It had to be better than the alternative, he supposed.
And it wasn't just her words and accusations, either. The burgeoning sense of blame and the strange feelings of remorse and regret only increased with time and exposure to this new awareness. He wasn't just a soldier anymore and it had begun to affect his outlook on life, both past and present.
Perhaps all of his current suffering was one of the hazards, one of the side effects of his former job and life that was destined to follow him around and torment his every moment, a sort of mental torture to pay his dues? Whatever the case, the frequency with which he was bombarded by these visions and emotions was at the point where he lay awake trembling and drenched in cold sweat more often than not.
So it didn't come as much of a shock when he began to experience them during daylight hours. After all, what was day, but the span of hours in which the darkness was kept at bay? The manifestation of night terrors revealing themselves at any given time brought his formerly dormant paranoia rearing back to life.
He often wondered if he might bow under pressure and follow in his twin's footsteps after all. He surely hoped not, but the heightened fear of losing his mind and his newly acquired freedom was a very real threat that filled him with dread.
But even with all the chaos within him, he would not break. He hadn't succumbed before and he most certainly wasn't going to crack up now. They would never know the inner turmoil and the demons that plagued his soul. No, he refused to grant these demoralizing thoughts, feelings and emotions a foothold in his little field of sanity. Granted, it was a constant struggle, a fight to maintain his mental defenses and block out the negativity that threatened to destroy him daily, but he never gave in.
Instead, he hid behind a smile that rivaled the sun, and a confidence he didn't quite possess but pretended he did, anyway.
It was his mask; this skin he was in.