Post by Daniel MacNamara on Oct 3, 2020 22:34:07 GMT -5
A storm.
There was always a storm somewhere, wasn’t there? There was always something there to disturb the tranquility around Daniel, but that was more by design than coincidence. The disquiet of the calm nights bothered him, it refused to let that ever restless mind of his find peace. It also showed a weakness in the redheaded MacNamara: that he was utterly incapable of sitting in a room quietly by himself. No, it was rarely outside forces that broke Daniel down, but rather what lurked in that shattered psyche.
Still, there was a storm out, and he’d found himself in the nursery of his home, in that room with nothing but himself, and the child in his arms that the storm had refused to let sleep soundly. His cries had drawn in the strange child’s even stranger father figure. Daniel hadn’t wanted to wake up Janet, or Karen, and so here he found himself cradling the child to urge it back to sleep after being so rudely awakened by the rolling roar of the thunder and the flash of lightning outside of his window.
Poor boy, it had to feel like the entire world was against him; Danny could relate.
“It’s alright, John. Storms pass.” His own voice was a quiet rumble, sleep still clinging to him as he tried to shake it from his head. Groggy, but still alert, he watched the fretful boy who was fairly unhappy with the ruckus outside. “Just like it’s alright to be afraid of that passing storm. Fear is okay. It’s normal. It’s alright, even, to feel fear.” He wondered how much of this sank in for the baby. Did he understand a word, or was it all for naught? The boy was calming down though, but that simply could have been due to Danny’s presence, the strange calm to his baritone rattle as he spoke to him. “In fact, fear is integral to being a person. There’s no shame in feeling it.” A talk that came too early, Danny felt. A talk that he might not ever get to give him in the future. Maybe that’s why he was holding him in those gnarled arms, keeping him steady with busted hands. Fear of being a failure of a father to a child he didn’t personally sire. Maybe it was a self fulfilling prophecy rolling into effect.
Fuck if he knew, but he gave the talk to the child anyways.
“Do you know what the single most crucial part of bravery is, my boy? It’s fear. Without the presence of fear, without the weight of it deep in your heart, you can’t ever be brave. Bravery means that you were terrified of pressing forward, but you did anyway because..” His voice trailed off for a moment, a faint quiver to it, a note of uncertainty in an otherwise nerveless voice. For a moment, Danny didn’t seem to be there; for a moment, Danny’s mind was somewhere else entirely. It was in a place that he so very rarely ventured to when he was around the boy that the impromptu visit shook him a second longer than he wanted it to, than it should have. A shake of his head, a blink of those blue eyes, and he was looking back to the child in the child in his arms. A coo came from the gentle boy that Daniel held close, and for a moment? The wolf in the skin of a man smiled. “...You did anyway because your love of what you mean to protect is greater than the fear of what you have in front of you.”
A chuckle was heard from the doorway, and Daniel soon found his eyes going from the child in his arms to the woman standing in the doorway with her body’s weight pressed up to the frame. Silver haired, with her lips pursed up into a smirk, Karen was watching him with John. She said nothing, she didn’t have to, Danny saw the look in her eyes. She was amused, the mirth practically glittering in her eyes while she took the pair of them, appreciating the two of them for what they were in that moment. Danny just.. Looked from here, back to John who was giving out just the tiniest of yawns, distracted between both Daniel and the impending promise of sleep.
The promise of rest, of another day.
Another day though, that was never promised, and the ginger knew it.
He knew it well enough to break his own goddamn hurt as he watched the boy in his arms try to fend off sleep. Just a small sleep, a temporary sleep, but a sleep that inevitable all the same. Danny could sympathize with him.
“Give into it, Lad. You’ll need the rest for tomorrow and what it brings. Be brave.” Leaning in to press a quiet kiss to the child’s forehead as he rose up, as he walked to the crib and sat the baby down in it, resting him there, running a thumb along his brow. The child’s eyes finally closed with one last yawn, turning his head against Danny’s hand as the man stood there over him, letting the babe rest in his crib.
“Speaking of giving into it, you know this isn’t real, right?” Came the voice from his side, from Karen’s mouth as he felt her arms around his middle, squeezing him, tugging him back to her. “That he isn’t yours, and that even if he was, he’d never be this peaceful, this easily. He’s never calm around you. No one is.” Those words drove into him like the first knife he’d ever felt the blade of. Sharp, penetrating, maddening in the pain, and yet the shock created a violent sort of familiarity within him. Pain. Pain was normal. “It’s not your fault. It’s just who you are. It’s the monster that you made yourself into to protect him, to protect us. It’s the same reason you drove Kaitlyn back to them, the same reason Izzy’s never going to trust you. It’s why I hurt you trying to bring you back to us, because you were so busy trying to find the strength to protect people who never asked for it that you never considered the cost..” He felt the heat of her lips on his shoulder, on his neck, punctuating sentences with the pauses of her voice just long enough for each kiss, bringing comfort in the middle of the pain. “The cost was us, the cost was everything that you tell yourself you did this for. Y’know, Big Guy, the people you love? You certainly didn’t do this because you got tired of pretending like you don’t enjoy hurting people, right..?”
“The truth, Danny, is that you never could have saved us if you wanted to. We were damned the moment that you told us that you loved us, my little wayward Prince..”
The voice that had been a razor to his insides was gone almost as fast as it’d appeared. Barely louder than a whisper and yet echoing in a hellish cacophony that he couldn’t shake loose. Karen wasn’t at his side, or behind him. John wasn’t in his crib.
Neither of them were there, Janet wasn’t there. No one was there. There was no crib. There was nothing but the burnt out skeleton of a home while flames consumed the guts of that estate and the screams cut through the air, and just like that, just as he thought it might split his ear drums.
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
He was awake. He couldn’t breathe. His chest was so fucking tight that he thought it might split his chest in two. His heart was less of a beating drum, and more of a mad animal desperate to break out of its cage and rip into what lurked outside of it. Every vein felt like an inferno, his mouth was drier than a gulch in the desert. If death had even crept on him closer outside of a ring in that moment, Daniel couldn’t recall it in that moment while he pulled his sorry body upwards to swing his feet off to the side of that couch just to find ground to anchor himself to. Strong hands cupped his face, his fingers threading into his fair colored hair as if trying to find reins to clutch, to ride out of the fog that filled his brain.
“Fucking christ.” Choking out those words as if trying to vomit out the venomous bile that betrayed his stomach. “Not again.” The same nightmare: his world on fire, and he was powerless to stop it. The screams of those he loved, and he couldn’t silence them. The same maddening vision of flames and ash in vicious repetition, no matter how it started, it always had the same ending, and he always woke up as if the ash and soot had found its way into his lungs through sheer osmosis between the veil of what was a dream and what was reality. It told him the same thing, it told him what he already knew.
Did he have the strength to pull himself up to fight again? To fight again? To go against these people? Would he find his bravery? Did that even matter? He could feel that sulfur deep in his chest that came as a result of the indignation that swelled up in him at the thought. “You’re a fucking coward, Daniel.” Dragging his palms across his face, over his face, obscuring it from the rest of the room, not that he needed to, no one was there but him. “You’re so fucking afraid of being called a coward that you’ll run headlong into every gods damned fight just to prove that you’re not, aren’t you?” Those hands dropped and he allowed himself to breathe, to focus on the stagnant air of the room that filled and exited his lungs with each heave of that granite solid chest; every muscle fibre felt tight, like the string of a bow drawn back with the arrow nocked and ready to be loosed.
No one answered. No one was there to answer.
It was just him, and the dark.
“They keep telling me to sleep, but none of them get what’s waiting on me when I close my eyes. None of them can know, because if they did, they’d never understand it. They’d make it about them, they’d try to put what I carry on their shoulders because they think burdens should be shared. They’re sweet, they’re loving, but they’ll never get it.” He spoke into the darkness again, to no one. Maybe he spoke to something that only he could see, that was only there for him, or maybe some part of Daniel had finally opted to go off into the deep end of that murky pool inside of his head.
He fuckin’ sighed, letting that air he kept inside of his lungs flood outward.
Agitated. He was agitated to say the least.
“I beat Anna, and then I lost my way on the Rail Rumble while she won it. I watched that weaverkin go the distance from the front with me, to the very back with Miles. I watched her take what I promised would be mine, and for the life of me, I can’t seem to recall how that happened. I barely remember any part of it beyond dragging O’Brien off of that wretched fucking train with me as we hit the ground, and then nothing. I don’t remember boarding. I..” Still narrating, still talking to himself as he tried to work the saliva up to wet his mouth. “I..”
“Who are you talking to, Danny?” There it was. Just like in his dreams. His eyes flickered up from staring at the silhouettes of his hands to the doorway, staring at Karen who… wasn’t at all like she’d been in his dreams. Not perfect, she was half asleep with disheveled hair, and far from looking like the picture of mirth and merriment. Concern was scrawled across her pretty face, from the crinkle in her brow to the half frown that rode her lips.
“I..”
“Nightmares, again?”
“No, I was j--”
“...Just trying to lie to the girl who’s seen what you look like after having one?”
“Yes.”
He breathed out again, and she snorted in mild disbelief before she walked to him and dropped on that couch next to him as if this was normal. As if this was their normal. She didn’t speak at first, she didn’t have to. She knew he was going to lie to him before he told her that lie, and she forgave him for it all the same, even if part of her wanted to send her knuckles crashing into his head for it. Or maybe he just imagined that she wanted to do that. Maybe he--
Her hand was turning his over and intertwining her fingers with his own. His hand, on the bottom, with the palm upturned and hers nestled into the space it created. She didn’t have to say a word at that moment.. He understood. Come home to me. Intact. She said without speaking, just a squeeze of her hand to his, a kiss from her lips to his cheek before she left him, before she got up and she walked out of that room, only lingering at the door for a moment to look over her shoulder at him. It was a weak smile she gave, but a smile nonetheless as she let him be.
It was enough.
Her. Them. That’s why he was fighting.
That’s why he was going to go into that monster’s ball that they called Guerilla Warfare.
That’s why, he was going to do everything within his power to win.
There was always a storm somewhere, wasn’t there? There was always something there to disturb the tranquility around Daniel, but that was more by design than coincidence. The disquiet of the calm nights bothered him, it refused to let that ever restless mind of his find peace. It also showed a weakness in the redheaded MacNamara: that he was utterly incapable of sitting in a room quietly by himself. No, it was rarely outside forces that broke Daniel down, but rather what lurked in that shattered psyche.
Still, there was a storm out, and he’d found himself in the nursery of his home, in that room with nothing but himself, and the child in his arms that the storm had refused to let sleep soundly. His cries had drawn in the strange child’s even stranger father figure. Daniel hadn’t wanted to wake up Janet, or Karen, and so here he found himself cradling the child to urge it back to sleep after being so rudely awakened by the rolling roar of the thunder and the flash of lightning outside of his window.
Poor boy, it had to feel like the entire world was against him; Danny could relate.
“It’s alright, John. Storms pass.” His own voice was a quiet rumble, sleep still clinging to him as he tried to shake it from his head. Groggy, but still alert, he watched the fretful boy who was fairly unhappy with the ruckus outside. “Just like it’s alright to be afraid of that passing storm. Fear is okay. It’s normal. It’s alright, even, to feel fear.” He wondered how much of this sank in for the baby. Did he understand a word, or was it all for naught? The boy was calming down though, but that simply could have been due to Danny’s presence, the strange calm to his baritone rattle as he spoke to him. “In fact, fear is integral to being a person. There’s no shame in feeling it.” A talk that came too early, Danny felt. A talk that he might not ever get to give him in the future. Maybe that’s why he was holding him in those gnarled arms, keeping him steady with busted hands. Fear of being a failure of a father to a child he didn’t personally sire. Maybe it was a self fulfilling prophecy rolling into effect.
Fuck if he knew, but he gave the talk to the child anyways.
“Do you know what the single most crucial part of bravery is, my boy? It’s fear. Without the presence of fear, without the weight of it deep in your heart, you can’t ever be brave. Bravery means that you were terrified of pressing forward, but you did anyway because..” His voice trailed off for a moment, a faint quiver to it, a note of uncertainty in an otherwise nerveless voice. For a moment, Danny didn’t seem to be there; for a moment, Danny’s mind was somewhere else entirely. It was in a place that he so very rarely ventured to when he was around the boy that the impromptu visit shook him a second longer than he wanted it to, than it should have. A shake of his head, a blink of those blue eyes, and he was looking back to the child in the child in his arms. A coo came from the gentle boy that Daniel held close, and for a moment? The wolf in the skin of a man smiled. “...You did anyway because your love of what you mean to protect is greater than the fear of what you have in front of you.”
A chuckle was heard from the doorway, and Daniel soon found his eyes going from the child in his arms to the woman standing in the doorway with her body’s weight pressed up to the frame. Silver haired, with her lips pursed up into a smirk, Karen was watching him with John. She said nothing, she didn’t have to, Danny saw the look in her eyes. She was amused, the mirth practically glittering in her eyes while she took the pair of them, appreciating the two of them for what they were in that moment. Danny just.. Looked from here, back to John who was giving out just the tiniest of yawns, distracted between both Daniel and the impending promise of sleep.
The promise of rest, of another day.
Another day though, that was never promised, and the ginger knew it.
He knew it well enough to break his own goddamn hurt as he watched the boy in his arms try to fend off sleep. Just a small sleep, a temporary sleep, but a sleep that inevitable all the same. Danny could sympathize with him.
“Give into it, Lad. You’ll need the rest for tomorrow and what it brings. Be brave.” Leaning in to press a quiet kiss to the child’s forehead as he rose up, as he walked to the crib and sat the baby down in it, resting him there, running a thumb along his brow. The child’s eyes finally closed with one last yawn, turning his head against Danny’s hand as the man stood there over him, letting the babe rest in his crib.
“Speaking of giving into it, you know this isn’t real, right?” Came the voice from his side, from Karen’s mouth as he felt her arms around his middle, squeezing him, tugging him back to her. “That he isn’t yours, and that even if he was, he’d never be this peaceful, this easily. He’s never calm around you. No one is.” Those words drove into him like the first knife he’d ever felt the blade of. Sharp, penetrating, maddening in the pain, and yet the shock created a violent sort of familiarity within him. Pain. Pain was normal. “It’s not your fault. It’s just who you are. It’s the monster that you made yourself into to protect him, to protect us. It’s the same reason you drove Kaitlyn back to them, the same reason Izzy’s never going to trust you. It’s why I hurt you trying to bring you back to us, because you were so busy trying to find the strength to protect people who never asked for it that you never considered the cost..” He felt the heat of her lips on his shoulder, on his neck, punctuating sentences with the pauses of her voice just long enough for each kiss, bringing comfort in the middle of the pain. “The cost was us, the cost was everything that you tell yourself you did this for. Y’know, Big Guy, the people you love? You certainly didn’t do this because you got tired of pretending like you don’t enjoy hurting people, right..?”
“The truth, Danny, is that you never could have saved us if you wanted to. We were damned the moment that you told us that you loved us, my little wayward Prince..”
The voice that had been a razor to his insides was gone almost as fast as it’d appeared. Barely louder than a whisper and yet echoing in a hellish cacophony that he couldn’t shake loose. Karen wasn’t at his side, or behind him. John wasn’t in his crib.
Neither of them were there, Janet wasn’t there. No one was there. There was no crib. There was nothing but the burnt out skeleton of a home while flames consumed the guts of that estate and the screams cut through the air, and just like that, just as he thought it might split his ear drums.
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
He was awake. He couldn’t breathe. His chest was so fucking tight that he thought it might split his chest in two. His heart was less of a beating drum, and more of a mad animal desperate to break out of its cage and rip into what lurked outside of it. Every vein felt like an inferno, his mouth was drier than a gulch in the desert. If death had even crept on him closer outside of a ring in that moment, Daniel couldn’t recall it in that moment while he pulled his sorry body upwards to swing his feet off to the side of that couch just to find ground to anchor himself to. Strong hands cupped his face, his fingers threading into his fair colored hair as if trying to find reins to clutch, to ride out of the fog that filled his brain.
“Fucking christ.” Choking out those words as if trying to vomit out the venomous bile that betrayed his stomach. “Not again.” The same nightmare: his world on fire, and he was powerless to stop it. The screams of those he loved, and he couldn’t silence them. The same maddening vision of flames and ash in vicious repetition, no matter how it started, it always had the same ending, and he always woke up as if the ash and soot had found its way into his lungs through sheer osmosis between the veil of what was a dream and what was reality. It told him the same thing, it told him what he already knew.
Did he have the strength to pull himself up to fight again? To fight again? To go against these people? Would he find his bravery? Did that even matter? He could feel that sulfur deep in his chest that came as a result of the indignation that swelled up in him at the thought. “You’re a fucking coward, Daniel.” Dragging his palms across his face, over his face, obscuring it from the rest of the room, not that he needed to, no one was there but him. “You’re so fucking afraid of being called a coward that you’ll run headlong into every gods damned fight just to prove that you’re not, aren’t you?” Those hands dropped and he allowed himself to breathe, to focus on the stagnant air of the room that filled and exited his lungs with each heave of that granite solid chest; every muscle fibre felt tight, like the string of a bow drawn back with the arrow nocked and ready to be loosed.
No one answered. No one was there to answer.
It was just him, and the dark.
“They keep telling me to sleep, but none of them get what’s waiting on me when I close my eyes. None of them can know, because if they did, they’d never understand it. They’d make it about them, they’d try to put what I carry on their shoulders because they think burdens should be shared. They’re sweet, they’re loving, but they’ll never get it.” He spoke into the darkness again, to no one. Maybe he spoke to something that only he could see, that was only there for him, or maybe some part of Daniel had finally opted to go off into the deep end of that murky pool inside of his head.
He fuckin’ sighed, letting that air he kept inside of his lungs flood outward.
Agitated. He was agitated to say the least.
“I beat Anna, and then I lost my way on the Rail Rumble while she won it. I watched that weaverkin go the distance from the front with me, to the very back with Miles. I watched her take what I promised would be mine, and for the life of me, I can’t seem to recall how that happened. I barely remember any part of it beyond dragging O’Brien off of that wretched fucking train with me as we hit the ground, and then nothing. I don’t remember boarding. I..” Still narrating, still talking to himself as he tried to work the saliva up to wet his mouth. “I..”
“Who are you talking to, Danny?” There it was. Just like in his dreams. His eyes flickered up from staring at the silhouettes of his hands to the doorway, staring at Karen who… wasn’t at all like she’d been in his dreams. Not perfect, she was half asleep with disheveled hair, and far from looking like the picture of mirth and merriment. Concern was scrawled across her pretty face, from the crinkle in her brow to the half frown that rode her lips.
“I..”
“Nightmares, again?”
“No, I was j--”
“...Just trying to lie to the girl who’s seen what you look like after having one?”
“Yes.”
He breathed out again, and she snorted in mild disbelief before she walked to him and dropped on that couch next to him as if this was normal. As if this was their normal. She didn’t speak at first, she didn’t have to. She knew he was going to lie to him before he told her that lie, and she forgave him for it all the same, even if part of her wanted to send her knuckles crashing into his head for it. Or maybe he just imagined that she wanted to do that. Maybe he--
Her hand was turning his over and intertwining her fingers with his own. His hand, on the bottom, with the palm upturned and hers nestled into the space it created. She didn’t have to say a word at that moment.. He understood. Come home to me. Intact. She said without speaking, just a squeeze of her hand to his, a kiss from her lips to his cheek before she left him, before she got up and she walked out of that room, only lingering at the door for a moment to look over her shoulder at him. It was a weak smile she gave, but a smile nonetheless as she let him be.
It was enough.
Her. Them. That’s why he was fighting.
That’s why he was going to go into that monster’s ball that they called Guerilla Warfare.
That’s why, he was going to do everything within his power to win.