Southernbookgirl, you're the absolute sweetest! you always leave me the best reviews in the world that give me huge smiles and brighter days! I wish I could've gotten this to you sooner, but I had a very hard time forcing myself to write it after being on cloud 9 from the wedding. I'm sorry about that.

thanks a million for the request! :)

this is basically a reverse of my story "Pain".

She'd been running so hard her lungs were starting to burn, dry throat had been crying out for something to soothe it.

But she still kept running. The only tears came faster, pouring down her cheeks, nipping at her skin, blinding her line of vision.

She couldn't get far enough away.

The pain continued to claw at her chest like a bitch.

But this wasn't the same pain as what she'd been left with after her father dropped her off at the hospital when she was two, or what'd become familiar with each time she was sent back to the orphanage, or everything that hit her when she had to reject Toby's proposal, or even what had overwhelmed her a year ago during her father's sentence to prison. It was almost like what she'd felt after finding out her pregnancy was false.

But it so much worse.

Because the arms she'd learned to turn in a bad situation were the ones she'd held for a final time.

Allowing herself to open up was supposed to be a good thing. Working so hard at it for years had granted her the hopes she'd pushed away as a child. But in the blink of an eye, they'd been taken.

Why the fuck was that fair?

Happy's mouth was starting to feel like sandpaper.

She didn't know how long she'd been running for. Minutes, maybe hours.

But no matter how far she got, the memory still poisoned her mind, the pain raw and fresh.

When she was younger, she used to think that if she pushed everything far enough away, she could pretend it all didn't exist. And that'd been how she approached things for the majority of her life.

Being with Toby had taught her that she had to confront each problem, though. Ignoring issues often led to fighting, and she always hated fighting with him.

Something between an anguished breath and a whine escaped through the spaces between her teeth as if they were cell bars, and it was leaving the prison of her mouth.

She felt so exposed, so vulnerable. Even though there wasn't anyone around. Not a single damn person.

But the emotions had been ripped from the inside, masking her external features, shaking her shoulders hard enough to get tears to rattle out. She didn't currently have the strength to make it stop.

They just kept coming. Faster, harder, bullets speeding down her face, the picture of Toby's corpse in her mind being the trigger that couldn't stop going off.

And Happy realized she'd been sobbing. Chest violently shuddering, face rapidly becoming wet and sticky at the same time.

Quickly, she was finding it difficult to breathe. The knot of grief in her throat was a vacuum, sucking the air out.

She finally stopped running. She had no idea where she was. But it didn't matter.

Her body slumped against the wall of whatever building was behind her.

She fell to the ground in a heap of limbs and tears.

Happy let the bawling proceed, not restricted by repeatedly pounding her footsteps against the ground anymore.

She threw her head back. It stung when it came in contact with the thick wall, but it wasn't all that much compared to the aching in her chest.

It burned. And the pain hitting her had only increased.

She started to cry harder.

Running had just come as an instinct to her. It was what she'd always done before Toby. He'd taught her how not to. But holding his body in his arms, looking at the blood draining from his chest and into the street, she'd just been hit with the urge to run. What he'd shown her how to do over the years had easily slipped from her genius mind.

And that gave Happy a sickening sense of anger. She hadn't been able to do that simple thing.

Without a second thought, she slammed a hard fist onto the ground.

Then she started to cry harder, because damn it, that hurt.

Her eyes were so full that she couldn't even see clearly.

But who the hell cared? She'd already lost her sight today. Sight of what she should be doing, how to process it all, and what the fuck she was supposed to do now.

As a child, she'd always grappled with the question, where are you supposed to go when you don't have anywhere to go to? When you don't even have a home?

The difference now was, she knew that her home was lying dead, probably being loaded into a body bag, back on 5th Street.

Dead.

Her mother had died before Happy had even gotten the chance to meet her, then her father had abandoned her, and even when he'd come back, two and a half decades later, he'd still been sent off to prison. Now Toby was gone, too.

He promised he'd never pull the rug out from under her.

But it felt like it'd been yanked so hard, she'd fallen backwards and banged her head, the only things now clear to her being unfamiliar pain and grief, everything else hazy and out of reach. She hadn't come to yet.

Fuck.

There was this emptiness, a hole that kept expanding in her stomach. He'd always been the knot that tied her loneliness together and sealed it up. His death, like a sharpened pair of scissors, had cut the string.

And Happy just cried harder.