A/N-No, I don't own them. And after tonights ep, I have a feeling this may well hit close to canon which is why I'm starting to post now. I'll finish Follow Your Heart...eventually. I've got two things biting me and telling me to finish it-one being the plot bunny, the other being my Beta-I thank her dearly though, she rocks, but she's the one to turn all the hatred about the lack of Follow Your Heart to...;) Just kidding GE, I wub you...But anyway, don't own them, they belong to Tim Kring and Allan and NBC, I'm just borrowing them (Well, mostly Garret) for my own devices...
Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life. George Bernard Shaw
He stared down into the amber liquid and another gulp traced a warm path down. He felt it, just enough for him to be pleasantly warm, but it was not nearly enough to make him feel light-headed. That wasn't the purpose for it. There were times when that was what he did, sit there and go through glass after glass, but this night was not one of them.
This was taking the edge off, making him forget the pain. That's what this was. He finished off the glass and poured another, staring out the window. The nightlife was in that period of change, where the older crowd who had gone out for dinner, and maybe a movie was thinning out, heading home, and the young crowd was just heading out, ready for a night of club hopping and fun.
He took another sip. He didn't want to think about who should be in that crowd right now, he didn't want to think about anything. He wanted to forget. Another sip helped him on his path. He wanted to go to bed without the nightmares. He wanted a night where he wasn't haunted, he wanted to ignore the pain.
He looked up at the picture on the wall, and sat down hard on his couch, taking the picture down with him. She looked so vibrant in it, so utterly happy. He flipped it over, face down on the table, he didn't want to look at it, it hurt too much, to see her there, grinning at him, mocking him.
He offered up a toast to the patron saint of lost causes. He had never been a religious man, but what little faith he had was utterly gone. It was a mocking, bitter, toast. He had no where left to turn but backwards, turning his back on the things that had failed him the most, deceived him, toyed with him, hope and faith.
He took another gulp, unwinding a bit more, relaxing a bit more, but most of all forgetting a bit more. Forgetting the way that he had been duped by hope and faith, the way that they had picked him up and dropped him down, breaking him, shattering him. Forgetting the way that he had relied on them, praying for the first time in so long, his hopes building only to be violently shattered.
Once he had been an optimist, looking at the world as something new and bright and beautiful. Once he had been a fresh faced youth full of hope that the world would be better, that he could make a difference in it, full of faith in his fellow men. Once he had loved unconditionally, without a second thought. But now he knew better.
It hadn't taken long to replace that view with a more cynical one. A few months in the real world had taught him that man was a greedy, evil thing, looking out only for himself, and he had become another one just the same. It hadn't taken him long to learn that loving unconditionally just lead to getting your heart broken, but yet he still did, he still tried to make things work with every relationship.
Always in the back of his mind, he had hope. He had hope that he and Maggie would work out. He had hope that he and Rene would work out. He had hope that things would be OK, that everything would come out right in the end. But this time, hope had failed him, left him broken.
He drained the rest of the glass and felt it go straight to his head. That was his limit for the night, he wasn't intending to get drunk, he had to get up tomorrow, he didn't want the hangover, he was on cautious ground at work as it was. He was numb, that was the way he liked it. Numb enough to forget what had happened. Numb enough to sleep without the nightmares. This was what he needed.