rage
i'm gasping for the air to fill my lungs with everything I've lost
it's beginning to get to me, snow patrol
His mind's a mess.
Things come in rushes, flashes - then the whole world fractures and he's somewhere else, standing in the shoes in a stranger.
He can feel the guilt pooling in his stomach.
He struggles to remember a time when he didn't feel like he was drowning and like he couldn't breathe and so damn angry all the time.
He feels like he's holding onto the edge of everything that means something to him, and his fingers are slipping and soon he's going to tumble down and down and down he'll never be able to get back up.
He keeps seeing flashes of how things used to be - stills of past where he had everything under control, and he had everything he'd ever wanted.
Now, everything is broken.
They warned him when he took this job on that it would be hard - but they never told him about the psychological damage it would do; the months of isolation, the months of living a lie - the months without the familiar, without Cara or his family or the city he called home.
He can remember a moment - a few months ago now. It was before Nicole, before he made the worst decision of his life. Their anniversary, ten years, a milestone - and yet, they were on opposite sides of the country. Sean had ordered him to watch the delivery of a shipment, and he'd been on his feet all evening until the early hours. When he'd finally got in, just shy of four o'clock, he'd wanted to call her - tell her he loved her.
He'd wanted to call her. He'd picked up his phone and dialed her number, known by heart, but he knew he couldn't call. He wouldn't know what to say.
He felt like he was an impersonator in his clothes (that weren't his) living his life (which wasn't his) and saying those words (that he never believed in)
...
He thinks the worst thing is that Cara hates him now.
If Sean was to hurt him, kill him even, he's not sure it would hurt as much as it does now, seeing the look in Cara's eyes - the one that screams 'I'm scared of you', the look that says 'I don't know you anymore' - the eyes that are telling him he's lost her, that he's fucked this up far too much for things to ever go back to how they were.
...
He's loosing control, he's loosing the pieces of him he kept hidden away from the light of day and the corruption of the world he's found himself living in.
His boss, so long ago now, called the guys they were after the worst bastards you could ever meet, bad men, the worst - scum of the earth.
Black flickers across his vision. Cara's colleague, the surgeon with his good looks and charm, ends up on the floor. More black, more anger, more burning somewhere within, somewhere he didn't know existed. He kicks him, he wants him to hurt, to not touch Cara again.
A pause, a flash, a face. Cara, on their wedding day. Beautiful, serene. Her eyes didn't scream 'I don't know you anymore', they said 'I love you."
Safe to say, he's just as bad as the men he's after now.
He's lost all the pieces of the man he used to be, and as hard as he tries to scramble to get them all back, he can watch them drifting away, going somewhere he can't reach.
...
He thinks, maybe, given time - away from her, away from Sean and Nicole and the baby (oh god the baby) and Cara and the painful reminders of the mess he's caused and the heartbreak he's inflicted, he might be able to heal.
But whether he'll ever be able to get away is another question entirely.
And so's whether anyone will want him back, healed or not.
...
He's a shell of the man he used to be. What used to drive him - his unflinching devotion to his job - is slowly destroying him.
He wants to get the bad guys at any cost.
Even if that cost is becoming a bad guy; to burn to the ground everything he had and everything he dreamed of.
He'll probably lose his job. And he's already lost his marriage, lost Cara - they were the two things that every meant anything to him.
When this is over, when he's finished with the matches and flames, when he's stopped destroying, what then?
Nothing.
He has nothing.
And it's all his damn fault.
He doesn't know who he is anymore. He certainly isn't the same, not now, not after everything.
...
He's in his flat. Taped to to inside of his bathroom cabinet - a place no one ever goes, he makes sure - is a photo.
Him and Cara. They are so much younger; her barely twenty - him three, four years older. They are smiling, happy. He can't remember where they were or what always going on or who even took the picture.
He put it there to remind him who he was doing this for, but he's been blind, turned his gaze and he's slipped from the path he wanted and onto the sinner's road and his steps are heavy with guilt.
He wonders about how things have got to here, to this point - and he knows it's simple.
He is not the man he used to be. He's poison, he's rotten - he hurts the one's he loves.
Why?
He doesn't even know.
Anger assails him like a flare going off. He punches the wall next to the cabinet. The cheap plaster splinters and he can see the wood underneath.
He doesn't notice the ache in his hand as he stands and looks at the wall.
His gaze moves from the ugly mess of the wall to snapshot from paradise. He wonders how it feels to smile and mean it.
Black flashes across his vision. Blurs of memories, good and bad all mixing into one, corkscrewing into his heart and tearing it to pieces.
...
His mind's a mess.