Bro

He’s spiraling. He feels himself going mad, because he can’t feel the ground beneath him, the concrete seems to have melted into clay, into swill, into a sludge that’s seeping through his shoes, his socks, his clothes and it’s in him, it’s in him and he can’t breathe and suddenly, he’s choking.

He leans forward and places his head between his hands and takes a deep breath, and then another, and then another, and he keeps breathing because he can’t talk just yet, he just can’t.

It’s his fault. He should just quit, this is too much strain on him. He needs to quit, especially if things like this are going to keep happening and they will, because this is an imperfect world.

But he can’t just quit. He promised and when men make promises, his grandmother once told him, they’re supposed to hold true to their promise.

Though all things considered, he was pretty sure he’d never want his grandmother to see him like this.

Will closes his eyes just as he hears a stranger, a woman’s voice, and he takes one final breath between his teeth, the sound whistling out in a sharp, low sound.

“I did something terrible,” he says, blinking his eyes a few times to clear his vision. “I could have kept that man from jumping, but I didn’t. I didn’t make it in time. I was supposed to have, he’d be okay…he was supposed to be okay.”

He leans his head forward on the metal sign and he wonders, however vaguely, if he’s gathering a crowd. He’s okay, he’s not the one hurt, it’s that man’s family that’s hurt, that man’s family that will never see him smile again, that man whose children will never see him again if he has any, his love interest who will never see him again also.

He reaches forward and leans on the sign and then, he wraps his arms around it, as if the sign could offer some means of emotional support.

Most likely, the sign says YIELD or STOP or it has a black image of ducks to signal a cross-walk and warning for small animals.

“So how’s the concrete?” She can’t help but ask needing to break up the silence that’s starting to feel awkward to the point you could cut it with a knife. What she wouldn’t give for a temporary case of telepathy, because maybe then she’s be able to figure out what was going on inside of his head. All she wanted to do was help but she was fucking clueless on what to do. There might have been a seminar or two she missed back in her S.H.I.E.L.D days that might have covered these types of situations, but it’s obvious she blew those off in favor of fun things instead.

This must be her karmic payback for being a shitty student and even worse agent. She placed no blame on the man having a crisis, it wasn’t his fault. It was more her’s for having no idea how to help said crisis having man who was still laying on the ground looking pale like he had seen a ghost.

Maybe he had? How the fuck was she suppose to know when she wasn’t a goddamn mind reader. Though to be completely fair given all the strange shit she had seen while an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D, meant him seeing a ghost could be highly plausible.

She was honestly surprised to hear him speak after the long awkward silence since he apologized, thinking he had lost his voice as his shock seemingly swallowed him whole. It takes a hot minute for his words to fully sink in and she’s swore loudly inside her mind. Crisis management had never been something she excelled at back in her agent days. It had never been her job to talk someone down, never something she had been trained to do. She had been about distances aligning the perfect shot and waiting for negotiations to break down and being told to take the shot.

So she felt out of her depth as she looked at him, how torn up he was with guilt. Now that was something she understood, she herself often felt like she was drowning in her own all consuming guilt for the things she had done for and against S.H.I.E.L.D. She needs to say something, but she knows, she needs to tread lightly or she might fuck him up even worse with the wrong words.

“That’s really not that bad, if it makes you feel any better I’ve done far worse.” She tells him being honest while not exactly explaining what worse actually meant. “Listen, I’m sure you did everything you could. I knew you won’t believe me. You’ll say, no you could have done more. But honestly, you probably couldn’t. Sometimes our best isn’t enough.”

Those were probably the completely wrong things to say but she had nothing else to say. She could try and bullshit him, but she knows that’s the worse thing you can do. She knows this because she’s been on the receiving end after being under a certain Asgardian fuck-nut’s thrall. Nothing anyone said to her, made her feel better because it was all bullshit. So why bullshit this guy and make him feel even worse? She didn’t want to do that feeling like she’d never forgive herself if something happened to this stranger who was having the worst moment of his life.

The blonde stands up when he does though her movements are smooth while his are wobbly at best. He looks even worse as he clings to the sign in front of him, a gigantic STOP sign and she can’t help but think it has to mean something. So she walks over to him again and puts an arm around him and sighs.

hate-fighting-in-silence

His hands are shaking and he hasn’t been able to move for the past ten minutes. The promise recites back in his mind, that he won’t get this close, that he’ll be far away from any real danger, that something like this simply wouldn’t happen to him and he’s tempted to scream one word, maybe two, over and over.

‘Liar. You lied, you lied, you lied…YOU LIED, YOU LIED.’

What made him believe he was so special, so untouchable? Pathetic.

No. He agreed to these terms. The blame was solely his, no one else’s. He would have to live with the knowledge that nothing he could have done could have saved that man’s life, the man that chose to walk off a building instead of emerging into a room with bits of information that was to free two friends of his from a life sentence.

There was color on his shoulder and he reached forward, for it was orange in a colorless world, it was ichor, the blood of the gods that pooled around him to grant him some hint of refuse in a world leached of all light and sound. It was a blanket someone put on him to help shock, but he was no longer in pain.

He was panicking but he didn’t want to sit anymore here and so, he calmly stood, folded the blanket on the park bench, and got to walking.

He grappled for a sign when he made it a block and he could go no more. His legs went out, black spots blossomed over his vision, and all he felt was a spreading numbness.

It should have been a quiet night, but in a city that wasn’t possible. There was always chaos around, you just got the pleasure of not being involved. However, that was not always the case, somehow without trying and certainly without fail, she’d often found herself drag into situations, she hadn’t asked to be involved in. How or why, were often the questions on the tip of her tongue begging to be asked, but instead, she’d almost always end up saying fuck or shit, instead.

What should have been a quiet night quickly disappeared when she saw him. At first glance, he seemed fine. Maybe a little drunk or high, given his slight shamble. The small blonde could have continued on her way, when the man went from walking to a wreck on the ground. She hadn’t been paying close enough attention but given his new position on the ground, his legs must have given out from under him.

Now, she could have been an asshole and side stepped passed him and gone about her night, but she didn’t do that. Instead she did what any remotely decent person would do and went over to him. Her eyes scanned his frame looking for any visible injuries and once satisfied that he wasn’t about to bleed out on her, did she kneel down beside him.

“I’m so sorry,”

Those were the first words that came out of his mouth, and she was confused. She had been an curiously innocent bystander, who had seen a random guy make a crash landing to the ground at this point. So she had no idea where he had come from or what might have happened to him, but he was sorry and she was concerned.

“Um, okay. You’re sorry for what? I might have missed that part.”

❛ All the dolphins have ever done is muck about in the water having a good time. ❜

❛ Don’t panic. ❜

❛ Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now? ❜

❛ Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? ❜

❛ Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space. ❜

❛ If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now. ❜

❛ I’d far rather be happy than right any day. ❜

❛ This must be a Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays. ❜

❛ You’re turning into a penguin. Stop it. ❜

❛ No, I was only fooling. We are going to die after all. ❜

❛ So long, and thanks for all the fish. ❜

❛ Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. ❜

❛ If I asked you where the hell we were, would I regret it? ❜

❛ Ah, this is obviously some strange use of the word safe that I wasn’t previously aware of. ❜

❛ There’s an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they’ve worked out. ❜

❛ I think you ought to know I’m feeling very depressed. ❜

❛ All through my life I’ve had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was. ❜

❛ Life. Loathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it. ❜

❛ Ow! My brains! ❜

❛ Blood… blood… blood… blood… ❜

❛ I don’t want to die now! I’ve still got a headache! I don’t want to go to heaven with a headache, I’d be all cross and wouldn’t enjoy it! ❜

❛  My capacity for happiness you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first. ❜

❛ Oh dear, you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well. Are you all right? ❜

❛ Life! Don’t talk to me about life. ❜

❛ Pardon me for breathing, which I never do anyway so I don’t know why I bother to say it, oh god I’m so depressed. ❜

❛ The fully armed nuclear warheads are of course merely a courtesy detail. ❜

❛ Call that job satisfaction? ’Cause I don’t. ❜

❛ Very deep. You should send that in to the Reader’s Digest. They’ve got a page for people like you. ❜

❛ Do you find coming to terms with the mindless tedium of it all presents an interesting challenge? ❜

❛ Who is this God person anyway? ❜

❛ Hey, this is terrific! Someone down there is trying to kill us! ❜

❛  I’ll have you hung, drawn and quartered! And whipped! And boiled… until… until… until… until you’ve had enough. ❜

❛ That is really amazing. That really is truly amazing. That is so amazingly amazing I think I’d like to steal it. ❜

❛ I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my life-style. ❜

❛ You’ve got as much sex appeal as a road accident. ❜

❛ Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff. ❜

❛ It’s partly the curiosity, partly a sense of adventure, but mostly I think it’s the fame and the money. ❜