THE SILENT ARE DAMNED; CHARACTER DUMP

[J. HOLLOWAY]

[align=center][div style="width: 500px; text-align: justify; font-family: helvetica; font-size: 9pt; line-height: 1.4;"]The world has this lovely way of kicking people when they're down. Everyone and their mother wants to say that there will eventually be a recovery period, that eventually, things won't hurt so terribly. At this point, Jason isn't sure that he can believe it anymore. Not after all of this bullshit, because he’s twenty-one and looks like he was dragged through a rose bush by Satan himself, because he can't hear much of anything out of his left ear, because he has shrapnel scars that won't fucking fade, because there's a fire in his chest that won't settle to ash. It's a fire that wants to burn the world, starting with every pretty place he can find. He never lights the matches, and the memories never burn, but hate boils so harshly. It scalds sweetness from every picture he keeps tucked underneath his skin. The warmth of his brother's lover's hugs, the affectionate promises of stories, gentle ruffles of his hair — something small and delicate pressed up against his chest, a little bird with bones made of hollow steel and hair that smelled sweet even at the end of the world.

It has a tougher time sweeping that away than it does with anything else. He paints distance like apathy, worry like disdain, but he's not sure how to pretend that Tim naming his horse Patroclus didn't mean anything to him. Maybe that's his problem: it means too much. Because when he says that, this stops being anger and starts being grief.

obviously a wip