The past couple of days have been a swirling maelstrom of misery and self-pity, one indistinguishable hour bleeding listlessly into the next. I've spent more time curled up in the fetal position amidst my rumpled bedsheets than I care to dwell on, cycling between paroxysms (definition: a sort of fit, like having a spasm) of muffled sobbing and that horrible, soul-hollowing blankness that comes from having simply run out of tears to shed.

At some point - maybe it was yesterday? Maybe the day before? - I gave up on even trying to keep track. My bedroom became a pitch-dark cocoon, the curtains drawn tight against the mocking vibrancy of the world outside. It's a beautiful late July to get broken up with! Only the most tenacious rays of sunshine manage to slip through the cracks, dusty beams that seem to take on an almost confrontational quality as they play across the wreckage of my personal space.

Empty pints of ice cream litter the immediate vicinity of my nest, along with an assortment of discarded utensils, crumpled tissues, and various other detritus accumulated over the course of my...what, 36-hour pity party? I think there might even be a wadded-up t-shirt or two in the mix, though my memory is a bit hazy on the details. The cumulative effect is one of abject squalor, like the den of some feral, subterranean creature that has retreated into its lair to lick its wounds after a brutal mauling.

Not that the metaphor feels too far off the mark these days. The dull ache of heartbreak hasn't faded even slightly, just evolved into this bone-deep weariness that seeps into my veins, weighing me down like an inexorable undertow. Every so often a fresh surge of misery rips through me, as sudden and visceral as an unexpected blow to the solar plexus. In those moments, all I can do is curl in on myself and ride out the cresting tide of agony until it inevitably subsides, leaving me hollowed out and dry heaving in its wake.

Man. This sucks.

At some point during this waking purgatory, the door creaks open to admit the concerned, perpetually fretful presence of my mother. Her voice drifts to me in soothing murmurs, gentle platitudes meant to soothe and console that instead trigger an almost feral surge of irritation in my gut.

"Go away," I growl through gritted teeth, burrowing deeper beneath the safety of my comforter's downy embrace. "M'fine, just leave me 'lone..."

Undeterred, she presses on in that infuriatingly placating tone that sets my nerves screeching like nails on a chalkboard. "Sweetheart, you haven't eaten anything in over a day. At least let me bring you something, maybe some soup or -"

" Leave me alone! " The words explode from my lips in a guttural rasp, reverberating through the cramped space like a thunderclap. Needles of ice prick at the corners of my eyes, heralding the telltale burn of fresh tears threatening to spill forth.

There's a beat of stunned, wounded silence from the doorway. Then my mother's footsteps retreat in a hushed cadence of defeat, the hinges creaking softly as the entrance swings shut in her wake. A small, rational part of me recognizes that I'm being a stupid little piss baby. The emotional part demands more ice cream. I satisfy neither of them.

Instead I let the tears come freely, burying my face in the pillows to muffle the wordless noises. I don't know how long I lay there, body convulsing with each ragged exhalation, throat savaged from the violence of my anguished cries... but eventually, blessedly, the storm passes. Or at least plateaus into something a bit more manageable, leaving me drained and hollow.

At some point, my dad's softer cadences intrude on my grief-induced stupor. Unlike my mother, he doesn't try to cajole or placate - his approach is gentler, more passive. An offering of company and support without any strings attached, laid out for me to accept or reject as I see fit.

For a while I wallow in stubborn, adolescent petulance, pointedly ignoring his efforts. But inevitably my natural temperament for attachment asserts itself, and I find myself allowing him into my bedroom. We don't talk much - he understands a little better than Mom in that regard. Instead, he simply settles on the edge of the bed and pulls out his PDA, a silent bulwark of patient understanding as I proceed through whatever strange convulsions my emotions bring me.

It's this gradual erosion of my already tenuous fortitude that eventually drives me to seek an escape, any escape from the confines of this grief-sodden bunker. So one night, perhaps around one or two in the morning, I find myself creeping through the back alleys and shadowed corridors of Rhawnhurst on dreadfully familiar roads.

The faint traces of her shampoo still clinging to my pillowcase, now growing staler with each passing hour. The sweater she'd forgotten draped over the back of my desk chair, a forgotten token of intimacy now turned into a painful reminder that I'd have to return it to her one day. Little talismans and relics of happier times forcefully intertwined with the fresh, raw ache of our breakup.

UGH. I'm so melodramatic.

At one point, in a fit of spiraling self-pity and desperation, I even turn to Jordan for their usual brand of delinquent level-headedness. An impulse-purchase tin surreptitiously hand-delivered to my bedroom window late one afternoon - a fragrant emerald parcel of chemically-derived escapism, ostensibly my ticket to blissful, mindless respite from the ceaseless, haunting refrain of memory looping through my consciousness.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

It doesn't really work, though. I figured that would happen but the worst that I get is, like, ten minutes of fuzziness, and then it goes away. So instead, I go walking, sort of trusting my instincts to take me somewhere useful.

The tiny two-bedroom flat looms ahead like a promised oasis, all yellowed windows and battered brickface accented by peeling paint and cracked asphalt. A normal person might take one look at the place's ramshackle exterior and dismiss it as an abandoned hovel, uninhabitable and frankly unsafe.

But I'm no normal person anymore, am I? So I stride up to the scarred wooden door with a sort of dogged purpose, raising my hand to deliver a single sharp rap against its aged, pockmarked surface.

A heavy tread answers my summons almost immediately, the booming cadence of Bianca Agnelli's unmistakable basso tread rattling the floorboards beneath my feet. There's a pregnant pause as she no doubt checks the peephole, then twin locks clatter and the door swings wide to reveal the brawny, tatted firefighter in all her gruff, effortless charisma, at about one in the morning.

For a beat, she regards me through narrowed eyes, irises gleaming with reflected streetlight as her gaze sweeps over my clearly disheveled appearance. Then understanding seems to dawn across her craggy features, a rueful smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth.

"Aw hell, kiddo..." she rumbles, already stepping aside to usher me over the threshold. "Get your scrawny ass inside before you wake the whole damn neighborhood up. Then you're gonna tell me who hurt you and how much ass I have to whoop."

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So that's how I end up here, all bravado and crumpled indignity, tentatively edging my way through the domineering oak doors of the Delaware Valley Defenders' downtown HQ in the dead of night. One final, desperate bid for reprieve, for some fleeting taste of normalcy to reinvigorate my listless soul.

At first, it seems to be working. The familiar industrial bustle of ops washes over me like a healing balm as I pass through the bustling antechamber, nodding terse greetings to the smattering of personnel keeping the midnight vigil. With each echoing footfall along the polished floors of the main corridor, I can feel the weight of the past few days sloughing off bit by bit, allowing me to haltingly reassume that bulletproof veneer of the ever-stalwart Bloodhound that's become such an intrinsic part of my identity.

Of course, it's all a fragile facade, paper-thin and liable to come fluttering apart at the slightest provocation. But for now, at least, in the humming heart of the city's superhuman security apparatus, it's enough - enough to sustain me for a little while longer.

The training gym is blessedly empty when I arrive, the cavernous facility accented with a smattering of state-of-the-art weight and aerobic equipment. But I barely spare the gleaming chrome and rubber a passing glance, instead making a beeline for the reassuring familiarity of the mats, the sandbags, and the speedbags.

For a few blissful minutes, it's just me and the coarse fabric anchoring the ring, pummeling the heavy bag with fists, knees and elbows until a sheen of sweat emerges on my brow and the cloying phantoms of memory fade to a dull murmur. The steady thumpa-thumpa-thumpa of impacts becomes my mantra, lulling me into a trance-like state of serene emptiness where nothing exists but the singular, elemental dance of flesh and violence.

I try my best to avoid those instincts to clench my hands so hard that the teeth come out, mostly because I already popped a sandbag and I don't need Rampart getting mad at me for popping another one. I almost feel complete like this, like I'm back to some sort of baseline that I used to be before I decided to kiss 10 Grays of radiation, but these measures always feel so frighteningly un-useful. I can never remember what my face looked like a week ago, much less the bodily state of half-a-year-ago of my previous self. It's all just a body and I'm just living inside of it.

Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa-thumpa-thumpa it goes, rattling against my knuckles until they start to ache and split. The stinging feels great. Feels like something I could be using right about now. Keeps me sharp.

Of course, it can't last - these rare moments of transcendence, however fleeting, never really do.

"Pardon me... Bloodhound?"

The clipped, overly formal intonation shatters my reverie like a fragile soap bubble pricked with a needle. I spin with fists already rising in a defensive guard, heart thundering in my ears for one terrifying, adrenaline-laced instant -

Until my vision clears enough to make out Rampart's imperturbable features regarding me with a blend of polite concern and faint amusement, hands raised in an exaggerated placating gesture.

"Whoa there, Bucky," he rumbles, the edges of his mouth tugging upward in the faintest ghost of a smile. "It's just us, remember? No need to go all Aikido on my seven-foot ass unprovoked."

I blink owlishly, arms slowly lowering as reality reasserts itself and that fleeting surge of fight-or-flight chemicals ebbs away. "Oh... Rampart, hey. Shit, my bad..." I rasp, somehow managing a self-conscious chuckle around the thundering pulse still sounding in my ears. My tongue darts out, dabbing at the thin sheen of perspiration beading along my top lip. My hair itches where the pixie cut curls into the back side of my ear. "Guess I got a little, uh... tunnel vision there for a sec, huh?"

Rampart offers me an easy-going smirk and a wink, nodding in the direction of the heavy bag still swaying and creaking behind me. "Clearly. What's the deal there, slugger - looking to put a third hole in that thing to match the pair of craters your fists already served up?"

I glance back at the battered cylindrical slab of vinyl nylon, unable to stifle the flicker of chagrin that surges through me at the sight of the two fist-sized divots cratering its side. Yeesh, guess I was really going to town there for a minute. No wonder the big guy thought I was mid-meltdown or something. Not like I'd know anything about melting down recently. Who, me? Nah. I'm perfectly stable.

"Heh. Yeah, good thing the canvas is rated to take a hell of a beating," I offer by way of droll remark, brushing fresh trickles of sweat from my brow with the back of one hand. "Wouldn't want OSHA to come down on us too hard for endangering gym equipment, after all."

"Indeed," Rampart agrees with an amicable chuckle, sloping off his towering stance to lean casually against the ring ropes. "Though I do have to ask - you planning on monopolizing the mats all night there, Annie Oakley? Or are you maybe feeling generous enough to let the rest of us weekend warriors get in a few licks before curfew?"

"I don't know who that is," I mumble just loud enough to be heard. He waves it away politely.

I eye Rampart for a momentary beat, considering his casual invitation. A spar could be just what I need to shake off these lingering tendrils of self-pity and misery - nothing clears the mind quite like a solid ass-kicking, after all.