It feels like permission, and he's always needed that--someone to pull him in, hide his face for him, coo at him like it's alright if he slides back in time and bawls like a child. Pain shared isn't pain halved, in his experience--it's doubled, and spread, and he's been taking it on for years without giving any back.
Last time he cried, he was alone in the early hours of the morning, wandered away from the camp by the spring. He'd written Ty's name with his family's in Casey's notebook, he'd called him a friend--and he'd woken before the sun from a dream of his fingers in thick hair, and familiar green eyes full of laughter. He'd crawled away without even the dog to hold onto, crawled up at the base of a tree and sobbed himself sick. The last past reaches into the present, is his only guide now for the future, and he blusters another breath before sinking his face into her hair, reaching around her to clutch the shirt to her side and keep her close as long as he can.
"It's my fault," he whines, coughing at the end of the words as everything since New York reaches forward to choke him. He doesn't know, logically, how anything but Ty can be linked to him, but it feels pointed, it feels personal, three men in a row. They make him feel safe, for weeks at a time, and then they die.
Or worse. "He's gone," he says again, "his whole world is ashes and he's gone," the sob shaking out of him for the cruelty of it, that the one person who most wanted to be here was refused.
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Last time he cried, he was alone in the early hours of the morning, wandered away from the camp by the spring. He'd written Ty's name with his family's in Casey's notebook, he'd called him a friend--and he'd woken before the sun from a dream of his fingers in thick hair, and familiar green eyes full of laughter. He'd crawled away without even the dog to hold onto, crawled up at the base of a tree and sobbed himself sick. The last past reaches into the present, is his only guide now for the future, and he blusters another breath before sinking his face into her hair, reaching around her to clutch the shirt to her side and keep her close as long as he can.
"It's my fault," he whines, coughing at the end of the words as everything since New York reaches forward to choke him. He doesn't know, logically, how anything but Ty can be linked to him, but it feels pointed, it feels personal, three men in a row. They make him feel safe, for weeks at a time, and then they die.
Or worse. "He's gone," he says again, "his whole world is ashes and he's gone," the sob shaking out of him for the cruelty of it, that the one person who most wanted to be here was refused.