Breakable Goods | Part 2
Upon request, I'm considering expanding on one of my favorite angsty one-shots. This is short to test the waters. Let me know if there's more interest.
His fist flew through the wall, splitting the drywall with a crack. His bones crunched at the impact but he didn't give a shit. He bellowed out a loud "FUCK!" as he clenched his fists to pace the room, hot huffs of air expelled from his nose like a bull.
He pulled up his phone and found the text again.
"Frank she's pregnant"
And it felt like the air was squeezed from his lungs and the room itself. You'd be been a bit distant maybe, more emotional at times. He had noticed the way you laid a hand on your stomach for a brief second, thinking the gesture felt intimate and purposeful, but it was over just a quickly. There were signs if he had wanted to see them.
Instead he abandoned you. Or at least he felt like he had. He should have fucking known. He'd left you to wade through the complicated toil of early pregnancy in isolation -- physically present but absent in the ways that mattered. He felt the painful grip in his chest at the thought of you finding out without him, morning sickness in hiding, early scans with no one by your side. All because you had to tiptoe around his complicated past. All in service of unspoken grief. The grief he hadn't bothered to heal with anything but guns and death.
He bellows out another loud "FUCK!" as he flings his phone across the room. He sits on the nearby couch and leans his elbows on his thighs, holding his head in his hands and squeezing his eyes shut to think for a moment. He willed his breath to slow, letting the hammering of his heartbeat in his ears subside.
The image of your scrawled note flashes in his mind -- a scrap of paper on the coffee table torn from the same notebook you'd written him love notes to stuff in his coat pocket: "I can't do this. I'm sorry."
No details. No address. No reason. He'd spent the better part of an hour contacting every one of your friends and family he knew for just a whiff of a reason-- to answer the resounding Why? rattling in his skull. Remorse flooding him without detail or reason-- What had he done to scare you off?
Your friend Sophia -- whose apartment you were currently holed up in-- finally cracked at Frank's frantic desperation, divulging not only your location but also your current state.
"Frank she's pregnant" -- the text flashed in Frank's mind again, followed by a flood of memories from another life entirely. Sorrow and joy and grief and regret and love and anger and some horrible, wonderful cocktail of nearly every imaginable emotion had Frank heaving for air as he sat hunched on the couch. Tears stained his face and in this rare instance, he let them.
He let himself feel fear and sorrow instead of rage. He willed himself to feel the emptiness he had spent so long repressing with violence and vengeance and the void in his chest felt like pain-- real pain. Gripping and horrible along his sternum, agony with no place to go, nowhere to repel it. We wrung his hands as he endured it, his knuckles cracking in the places where bruises would be by morning. A strangled breath left his body as an animalistic sob.
And he endured it. He endured it. He endured it, resolving then and there to face the demons that haunted him because he couldn't make the same mistakes twice. And when he was finished, he'd get his family back.
