#ptsd!frank

[minxchester]

I Could Be Tripping, I Think I’m Addicted // Closed RP

@brothershardy​

Dean was not crazy. It did not matter that no one else saw the things that he did, and that he’d learned fast as a kid not to mention the monsters unless he wanted to see his mom tear up and his dad’s mouth tighten with worry and fear. It didn’t even matter that he realized the things he saw had to be the only secret he kept from Sammy, after his baby brother had run to their parents because Dean had terrified him one night stopping a shtriga from killing him.

He did regret that one--not that he’d killed the thing, but that Sam had woken up thinking that Dean was brandishing the knife at him, not the soul-stealing creature about to feed on him.

But despite being not crazy, Dean couldn’t convince people completely...and by the time he was fourteen, he’d had more shrinks than teachers. Or friends. Because people turned out to be monsters way too often, and Dean could not hide what he knew when he was the only person able to see and fucking fight the things that went bump in the dark.

So in the end, Dean was sad but not surprised when his parents agreed with the most recent therapist and had him committed indefinitely at Osawatomie State Hospital shortly after he turned fifteen. He should’ve been starting high school; instead, Dean  found himself assessed, given plain blue pants and a white shirt, and assigned to room with some kid named Kevin--he’d had a mental breakdown about academic pressures, and hadn’t really been the same since, apparently--in the hospital’s long-term care ward.

He wasn’t sure if he’d been here one year, or two at this point. Dean knew he was somewhere near seventeen, but that didn’t mean he’d passed twelve months in yet. Time passed differently within the bland off-white walls here.

And then Frank Hardy came along.

[batwomn]

Matt is startled awake by the thick smell of animal fear, but familiarity overrides his instincts — he does not immediately reach out, confront the shape sharing his bed. It is Frank Castle but it is not. So much of what makes Frank register to Matt, day after day, it is erased now. The unreal steadiness of his heart. Clean sweat and musk and the sticky scent of gun oil and the Kevlar. His physical stability, seeming indomitable in Matt's own 'vision'. All of it was gone, now, in the wake of a nightmare the man beside him had no control over. And that might be the worst of it, he thought. Losing control. The worst and the most foreign. He felt out of control just waiting it out — he found that his hands were balled in the sheets and his breathing had picked up. He was so desperate to undo this for Frank, to take it all away. But he did not have that power. Instead he waited. Waited out a loss of control for the both of them. And when finally Frank shuddered his way free of the horror, Matt accepted the wary stiffness and the thick smell of that dirty fear-sweat and the subsiding shivers when he wrapped his arms around Frank. And, after some time, Frank accepted those arms. Leaned his weight into them. They took control back.