Short thing for TRvBRC Life and Loss Challenge.
Thanks muchly to Des for looking it over~
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"Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live." -Norman Cousins
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Church knew that he wasn't the best man in the universe. In fact, he technically wasn't a man at all. He was a ghost.
But even as a ghost, he still wasn't a good man, if that made any sense at all.
He was selfish, a coward, narcissistic, had anger issues, couldn't shoot to save his life (no pun intended), and, as Tucker kept pointing out, he could stand to lose a couple of pounds.
All in all, Church deemed his entire life as an general failure, because deep down he knew that was exactly what he was.
A big, giant, fucking failure.
And he hated it.
He hated that, somewhere along the line, something had gone wrong. He hated that it was his fault, and that he couldn't blame it on someone else like he had been doing his entire life. He hated that, because his metaphorical heart had become so blackened and charred, it burned everything beautiful around him.
Once, he had loved Tex with everything he had. She had been the one constant thing in his life, the only person who he had ever dared open up to. And he knew that somewhere deep inside that metal heart of hers, she had made the mistake of loving him back.
And that was what had destroyed her.
Of all the stupid things he had done in his short, pathetic life, the one thing that ate at him from the inside out was losing Tex.
He remembered the first day he had met her; they had both been stupidly young, and she had been the hottest thing he had ever seen. With impossible curves, and fiery silk hair, she had stolen his heart even before he worked out the difference between lust and love.
And then he remembered the day he lost her, both of them clad in armour, that beautiful hair cut regulation short, (which only seemed to make her more sexy) as she told him to fuck off and leave her alone and he refused, and she slammed the door in his face.
And he added her to his ever-growing list of personal failures.
It was quite a long list, varying from completely disappointing his parents, to somehow being assigned to a fucking box canyon in the middle of fucking nowhere. Sometimes he would open a bottle of booze and go through each of them one-by-one, taking a sip every time he let someone down or failed so spectacularly that he had lost everything, and usually ended up completely smashed, most of the time passing out before he finished.
Which he still somehow managed to do, even though he was dead. Through some strange miracle, he was able get completely drunk out of his mind, the catch being that he still got the killer (pun intended) hangover that came with it in the morning.
It was like death was mocking him, by not letting him pass on, but still letting him escape through alcohol, and then mocking him more when he sat at the table the next morning with a cup of coffee steaming before him and pain so unbearable he had to close his eyes.
All in all, life had made Church certain of only two things: one was that he was such a failure that he even failed at dying, and two that he was destined to end up alone and bitter. And he hated it.