Audition Para
TW: PTSD, Depression, Night Terrors
Eli kept telling himself that it was normal to have nightmares. Many people had nightmares when they slept. Many people had trouble sleeping at night, and it was nothing to be ashamed of. Wasn’t it? Sure most people probably didn’t have nightmares over the things that the enforcer found himself having the same nightmare about, but then again, most of those people weren’t like him. They hadn’t had to do the things he had been forced to do so he would survive. Not that he would particularly take any of it back. It had all been instrumental in putting him here where he was now. Though perhaps there was the one thing he wishes he could go back and not have done.
The shrill beeping of the alarm clock reminded him that it was an end to his restless night. Breath hung heavy in his chest. There was a fog there. Almost like he had absorbed the heaviness of that moment, that he had let it fester within him, let it sear its mark on his very soul. Strange thoughts for anyone to have but particularly strange for someone who was not all that much of a spiritual or religious person in the first place. What use did a man like him even have for a soul? It could only get in the way, certainly?
Mornings after those nights, all Elijah could do was take it all in pieces. One step. Two steps. Three steps. Open the door, turn the corner, take another few haltering steps and reach the next door. Turn the handle, step inside, and try hard as he could not to look at himself in the mirror. The shower could provide some much needed respite, or at least, he hoped that it could. As soon as the water began to hit his head however, he found he was somewhere else entirely.
As the water droplets turned into the raindrops from that black night, the enforcer was back there again. The man below him, wrists bound, begging for mercy. The man who he called brother’s words echoing in his ears, throbbing like a heartbeat. Those words he told himself to finally pull the trigger screaming through his mind. You’ve killed for less. Elijah knew it was true. Then why was this one night unable to stop haunting him? Why did this man’s face stay pressed into his memory? Why did every shower become that night? And most importantly, why could he no longer sleep?
It wasn’t even the fact that he had known the man whose forehead he had decorated with a bullet, as that had been no issue in the past. He hated reliving the night, he hated the constant questioning of why it would not leave him, and he hated the pit deep in his stomach when it festered and burned him like an ulcer. The more he contemplated it, the more he wondered whether or not this would be the death of him one day. At either his own hand or someone else’s. Though things of that nature were too far in the future for the enforcer to consider at the moment. All he knew was that he had to take the time to make it through the day. Then he could begin the endless fight against the memories and the dreams that night again.
