Still one of my favorite things I've written
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They’d heard Jensen cry a number of times: first while he was still on painkillers, which they’d written off as possible delirium. But it hadn’t stopped, instead becoming a kind of ritual, whenever he brushed the surface of unconsciousness, when he was too tired to fight. The dog had verified their suspicions, sticking to the visitor like glue, whimpering and pawing to be let inside in the mornings, to lick the man awake. Dragon had been like that for Sharp, on their worst days. A weighted, electric blanket.
How Adam was going to handle this was up in the air. Even the most well-adjusted, trauma-trained people were bent and broken by repeated bludgeoning. Sharp could feel the anger radiating off of Jensen like he was a nuclear reactor, cooling towers dried out and cracking. He wasn’t crying enough—there was no ‘enough’; nothing would ever justify it, make it right, drain the pain away faster that it could redouble.
They didn’t want him to go. They wanted to grab onto him—despite the impression that his metal limbs would be molten with rage, would set them on fire—and anchor him, anchor him the way Dragon and the birds and the woods and the smell of microbes in hot soil upon first raindrops had anchored them. Wait, quiet, until the blaze died down, so he might hear them when they promised that the world still offered things: tiny glimmers of hope, secret signals that it was all for you; the grass under your feet, the wind in torn screens, and thunderheads rising in the western sky, billowing gods that demanded no sacrifice, no price of admission to their theatrics. Sharp wanted Adam to sit on the porch and watch an ant crawl over his palm, the way they had at the start, and know that he was alive. The cruelty of ‘having a life’ was reduced to laugher, splintering under light years of solar radiation and the overwhelming roar of blood and bile, the feral absolution of being a living animal.
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from Flightless