The Nursery
pt 3 of my series
Stepping inside, Ghost feels the cold air through his mask.
It’s almost suffocating.
He doesn’t want to be here right now,
but he knows if he doesn’t find some closure,
it will swallow him whole.
‘This is what Price would have wanted’
‘He would want me to make peace with myself,’ Ghost mutters to himself.
The first door he reaches, on the left,
was his childhood bedroom,
the nursery he grew out of.
The one they never bothered to change.
Not that it would have mattered.
He never had a real childhood to begin with.
Pausing at the door handle,
Ghost takes a deep breath, feeling sweat trickle down his forehead.
Pushing the door open, a rush of musty air fills his nose.
It’s exactly the way he remembered.
A mobile turns slowly above his crib
faded wallpaper,
stars, moons, foxes,
and a rocking chair that once held his mother
He stands there, absorbing every crevice in the room,
allowing the memories to wash over him,
but they don’t feel warm.
They feel like a sick joke
a sort of trap.
He hears his mother’s voice, faint, distant, like a lullaby in a dream.
But that’s not enough to drown out the venomous echoes of his father.
He stumbles toward the bed.
The same small frame,
the metal joints rustle,
the mattress sunken in the middle
like it never stopped waiting for him.
Ghost kneels beside it,
gloved fingers brushing the edge.
This was where he cried himself to sleep,
night after night.
Pathetic.
He stands up abruptly,
scoffing at the thought of being so weak,
jaw locked so tight it aches.
The mask clings to his skin like a second face,
but it doesn’t protect him from this.
The closet stares at him like a wound left open too long.
Slowly drifting towards it,
the floorboards creaking under his weight.
Pulling the door open,
it’s still dark,
still small,
still the same smell of fear and hopelessness.
He crouches and peels back the corner of the floorboard,
his hands remembering the motion,
even if his mind doesn’t want to.
That’s where he’d hidden it, his first gun.
A stolen thing,
metal slick and trembling in his twelve year old hands,
his secret,
stolen, not for rebellion but for survival.
But the gun is gone.
Instead,
tucked in the gap between the boards.
Something dry.
He reaches out.
A clump of hair,
Blonde. Matted. Tangled.
His
Still crusted with dried blood,
preserved through time out of spite.
The stench hits him all at once,
rotten ron and old sweat and pain that never healed right.
Stomach turning,
he back away fast,
nearly tripping.
His entire body burns with rage,
chest heaving.
every ounce of muscle in his body wants to peel from his bones.
The world around him blurs,
and his thoughts become violent,
rage boiling his blood
It’s not just a room anymore,
It's a cage.
A siren blares in his mind that just won’t shut off.
Suddenly, he’s not a man standing in a house,
he’s a boy, a child,
small, afraid. Alone.
Snap
It all breaks loose.
All control he had, is gone.
He grabs the bed frame, flips it over,
metal shrieking across the floor.
He grabs the fake stars covering the ceiling,
and rips them off with such a force,
shards raining to the floor
He punches holes in the walls,
once, twice, the plaster giving away beneath the floor.
He tears the closet door from its hinges,
throws it across the room like it weighs nothing
his nails scraping at the wood,
gouging, tearing at it with frantic desperation.
anything to regain control.
anything to make it stop.
he doesn’t realize he’s screaming until his throat is raw.
This isn’t therapy
This isn’t closure.
This is war.
And for the first time in years,
it’s not with an enemy,
it’s here.
its him.
The child buried beneath the soldier.
The boy who still remembers the sting of the belt,
the heat of his father’s breath,
the echoes of a mother who wasn’t all there.
Doesn’t know when the child became a man.
He’s a devil in a child’s skin,
a monster who’s forgotten what it feels like to be small,
to be weak, to be afraid.
All he knows is the destruction.
he burning need to tear apart what has haunted him for so long.
the rage that makes him feel alive again,
like it’s the only thing in this forsaken house that hasn’t abandoned him.
He rips through the room like a wild animal,
tearing down what he used to love,
spitting on what he once called home.
And for a second, in the smoke of his fury,
he can hear the laughter again.
But it’s not the sound of happiness.
It’s the shrill, mocking laughter of ghosts,
of the father who never cared,
of the memories that poisoned everything he touched.
For a moment,
he’s a child again,
his little hands clutching the edge of the bed,
his heart a trembling thing,
and he’s screaming for someone, anyone, to make it stop.
But there’s no one left to save him.
Only the man he’s become.
And the war rages on,
not with an enemy,
but with the broken boy he used to be.
