This one is a bit of a vent-fic because lockdown sucks and people are being less than fantastic right now.
There were three stages to it.
The first was the red hot flicker and flare of frustration, reactive and over as quickly as it started, like a match being struck and burning into a brittle twig of carbon and ash. It was loud but short-lasting.
But if the red hot flare had enough fuel, it became the white hot, focused burn. A welder’s torch; a precision tool that seared, cut and sliced. It was silent, clinical and expressionless. Death usually followed in its wake, delivered dispassionately.
Then there was the roar. That one was safeties off, nuke’s armed, make your way to the bunker or be caught in the fall out.
Adam had seen the roar once, after a conference on base where one of the delegates had reduced Scarlet to an ‘it’ – a tool or a weapon, to be used and discarded and referred to him as such, while Scarlet was present in the room. That delegate had even swayed two or three others to his way of thinking, in the face of the blistering remonstrances from the colonel and others’ whose opinions actually mattered.
For someone with the kind of ‘who am I?’ questions that Paul had, half-answered and kept carefully locked away until he’d scraped together the courage and the right company to face them, every utterance had been a proverbial knife wound. Those who knew him well enough to see behind the expressionless mask knew it had been death by a thousand cuts for him in that conference room.
Scarlet had somehow held it together until the end of the meeting, at which point he made his way to the gym.
He’d followed, silent witness as Paul stripped off his cap and tunic, roared out his fury and laid into one of the punching bags, until his knuckles were raw and bleeding and he was crumpled to the floor and sobbing for breath.
Adam crossed the room and sat beside him, handing over a towel with which to wipe up the blood on his hands. “I thought for a minute there you were going to drag that guy over the conference table,” he told Scarlet.
Paul had offered him a bitter, humourless expression that wasn’t a grin but a twisting of his lips. “What do you think that punching bag was standing in for?”