On the Other Side of the Reeds

by Kaira Sakamoto

100 word drabbles of two Sole Survivors where if things had been different, if the other had died instead, these would be their stories. M!SS and F!SS. Alexander and Alexis Reed, alternating. Rated for future chapters. Chapter 5: Psycho.

5. Alexander: Psycho

The first time he sees it he nearly doesn't know what it is. True recognition of things have a hard time settling in nowadays and this day is no different. It's such a simple, tiny thing.

His hand starts shaking when he remembers. It'll help boost your damage, they'd told him. It did that but they had said nothing about the sheer rage it invoked that made you blind to who you were fighting. When they'd found him, he'd been beating into his recon partner, nearly as drugged and beat up as he himself was, with blood on both of their fists and their guns up on the ridge, forgotten. They'd left their posts in the haze and it was sheer dumb luck that they'd been in an isolated camp. That they hadn't been killed in their high or worse.

The memories of that night are still filtered all these years later and the leftover trembling had taken most of his attention afterwards. He hadn't been able to forget the lift it'd brought from the reality of war. For once he hadn't felt cold. Then the cold had crept back in and everything kept shocking him and he wasn't even allowed to see his partner and no one would tell him what happened.

The higher ups had expressed disapproval but it didn't stop them from providing more of the drug to soldiers going into isolated communist camps in order to slaughter the soldiers inside. He'd soon found out that the high wasn't as great as the first injection, and that the cold and the fear and the loneliness always tore its way back into his bones eventually. The red-warm rage never stayed for long.

The sight of the psycho now filled him with dread. When he'd last heard of it, it hadn't been released properly into Boston. There'd only been rumors. That it was here on a single raider twisted his guts into knots. He hoped it wasn't common, but the migraine he had at the memories told him the opposite. All he could recall was the trouble it caused him and the withdrawal he'd gone through, huddle in the corner of a cold, empty place.

He pocketed it anyway, and heard the slamming of jail cell doors distantly in his head.