Disclaimer - I officially disavow any ownership of the Shadowrun universe. Characters are directly paralleled with the characters of Eternal Sonata, which I also do not claim to own. All parallels are fundamentally similar, but the characters themselves are radically different in most respects. All Shadowrun parallels/PC's are my intellectual property and not for reuse outside this fanfiction.

Advisory Warning - This chapter contains content not approved for young audiences, including: gore, alcohol abuse, emotional trauma, and bodily functions. Viewer discretion is advised.

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The bottle shattered against the cold concrete wall, spraying glass shards and whiskey in an amber explosion. Shortly after, a metal folding chair crashed into another similarly grey wall. Its form –already warped almost beyond recognition – twisted further, becoming less of an object of comfort and more one of tortuous and tentative existence. More objects, all cheaply made and in various stages of demolition, were treated with the same wrath. Their owner howled and screamed and wept as his memories and rage overcame him yet again, becoming a tempest of destruction in his own home (though he would hesitate to call it such).

This was not unusual.

When he drank, the memories came back. Sometimes they didn't, and it was for these nights of blissful ignorance that the Runner continued to poison himself when he wasn't working. More often than not, the nights began with one drink. Then another. Then the rest of the bottle. Finally, the memories he really wished to forget would come chasing back, grieving and enraging him with such force that violence inevitably ensued. Furniture would break, bottles would shatter… he was lucky he put his guns away or he might just blow his own damn brains out. But nothing would change; life in this damn world would move on, and there would be no one left to remember.

But why did it have to be him? Why did he alone have to remember everything?

The whirlwind calmed, the drunken soldier breathing heavily with exertion as he collapsed onto his knees. The same concrete of his walls made up the floor: cold, hard, rough, and unforgiving as all his weight crashed into his knees. They would likely be bruised in the morning, but he couldn't care less at the moment. Tears dripped onto the porous material, seeping in with little more than a slight darkness to mark their absorption. There was a moment's pause, then a fist collided with the surface. An awful crack sounded through the room, repeated over and over as he continued punching the floor in his anger. Red now stained the grey, splattering more and more with every strike as old scars opened and new cuts formed.

"Why… why damn it?!" His voice quavered with emotion; rage and grief vying for top spot while anguish backed them both. "Why did you have to die? Don't you see what's happened, Travis?" His fist rested against the floor now, oozing blood as the broken man sobbed in his depression and fury.

"Don't you see what happened, you selfish son of a bitch?" he whispered to the air. "You can't tell me you don't see what I had to do. You made me this animal, you bastard…" He sobbed once, knowing it wasn't the truth, and curled up on the floor. He needed to sleep – to get away from this madness. Every night this happened, he thought the same thing in his drunkenness; sleep would make the memories go away, and tomorrow he'd sort things out.

But as he slipped away into unconsciousness, the memories turned into dreams and ravaged him further. The only benefit was that they never lasted long. Eventually, he would wake up screaming.

Tonight, they reminded him of the accident. Of Clair. All that blood, the shattered glass, the twisted metal and fiberglass… and there she was, pale and perfect. She could almost be sleeping if it weren't for the fact that her head hung brokenly and her chest cavity lay open before him.

Her eyes were open – her pretty, altered eyes whose irises had been a bright purple-pink. Fuchsia, she had called it, and only a few shades darker than her gently curling hair. It had looked like cotton candy when he'd met her, but now…

Those eyes stared at him blankly, accusing as the Lone Star Enforcer told him what had happened. An accident, they said; the other driver hit her head on at just the wrong angle, blowing her whole hydrogen system sky high. Even if she had lived until the ambulance had arrived, the explosion had evaporated her legs completely. He could only stare at her pale, beautiful face as the words turned into a drone behind him.

You did this she seemed to say. You failed to protect me. Just like you failed him.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, reaching out to touch her face gently. In an instant, the expression on her face contorted to a snarl and she jolted upright in the driver's seat, lunging for him –

With a gasp, he awoke, shaking in terror and grief. A jolt passed through his gut, and the tall man dragged himself to the bathroom as quickly as he could, barely making it in time to vomit the bottle and a half of whiskey and the mostly digested meal bar into the grungy toilet. He remained there, retching until his stomach cramped and his entire day lay in the dirty grey porcelain, then heaved for another few minutes. Eventually, his stomach stopped convulsing and he collapsed in exhaustion, dropping into a moment of dreamlessness on the bathroom floor.

The moment didn't last long. They never did.

He startled awake an hour or two later, panicking for a moment as he struggled to remember where he was. The stench brought his memory back, and he gagged as he fumbled for the lever of the toilet, flushing the contents away. He pulled himself up, crying out briefly at the pain in his right hand, then staggered from the tiny room back to the studio's main room. Here, he collapsed on the stained and ragged couch, the smell of human being and alcohol and blood reminding him that it was his. He reached blindly for his phone or watch, managing to grasp the latter somewhere nearby on the floor. Peering wearily at the time, he groaned and almost flung it across the room, but refrained and simply closed his eyes to get what little fitful sleep he could. It was almost another hour before his nerves calmed and he drifted into a light doze, twitching at every noise in the small apartment.

In the morning, he would wake, and he would clean up and take care of the room. The blood and alcohol would be mopped up, the furniture would be righted (what was salvageable, at least), and it would almost appear as if nothing had happened. And he would go about his day in the same mind.

But he would always know. He would always remember. It may be the next night or another week, and he would still remember. And despite that, it would happen again. It would always happen again.

However, tonight would be one of the last nights it happened to him alone.

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~AS87