Work Text:
You must make your heart steel.
Upon first glance, it’s solid advice. One only need look around town to see how strong steel or, more specifically, Godfrey steel, is. It forms the piles of the bridges that straddle the polluted, trash-ridden river and holds up the White Tower and serves as the very foundation of thousands of miles of railroad tracks crisscrossing the country.
Godfrey steel is not easily breakable.
Ergo, by extension, if he makes his heart steel...
Well. It’s obvious, isn’t it?
&.
Never mind the fact that the Godfrey steel mill has lain dormant for years now. Never mind that the Bessemer converter has been tipped over to lay upon its side, its insides relegated to a place for quick fucks, not molten metal.
Never mind that the amount of rail traffic going over those tracks is decreasing daily.
That’s not important.
What’s important is that the tracks are still usable, still in prime shape, untainted by rust. Roman has a piece of one, a single link, one of the first ever forged nearly a century ago, mounted on heavy brackets jutting out of the wall of his bedroom Sometimes, he takes it off the brackets and simply pulls on it, sure that this will be the time that he’ll feel some kind of shifting, maybe even a crack.
But even a century after birth, Godfrey steel remains the same.
Unbreakable.
&.
You must make your heart steel.
He tries. Truly. Aside from Letha and Shelley, and he doesn’t think that they count. There has to be some kind of provision for family, family that you actually like.
His mother, it goes without saying, is not included.
But all steel, Godfrey or not, develops a weakness at some point. It’s inevitable. It will start out small, nearly invisible, an orange smudge of rust buried on the underside of a girder or a crack the width of a hair, formed from years of pressure and weathering.
&.
By the time Roman realizes, really realizes, that Peter isn’t like Letha or Shelley, realizes that he’s a crack, a wave of rust eating deep into the metal supports inside his chest, it’s too late to deal with it by simply throwing more steel on top.
The crack is too deep.
The rust is too pervasive.
He realizes this when he’s sitting on the floor of the empty attic, staring at all the places where Shelley used to be, mind racing with the fact that Letha and the baby are dead and cold, that the only two people he’d never needed to steel himself against are gone.
He realizes this because, when his mother asks what he needs, he doesn’t have to think before he opens his mouth.
“Peter.”
&.
The trailer is a mess.
Everything meaningful is gone; the small television, the photos in gaudy frames likely stolen from a convenience store, the battered boots by the door. The kitchen still smells like Lynda’s cooking. There are still sheets on Peter’s too-narrow bed.
The bathroom sink is full of Peter’s hair.
For some reason, it’s that particular detail that makes the crack in Roman’s steel heart grow into a gulf.
He puts his fist through the mirror above the sink, through the wall connecting the bathroom to Peter’s bedroom, and while blood pours down the back of his hand to his wrists, he screams until his throat feels raw and he forgets how to breathe.
&.
You must make your heart steel.
Except even steel breaks eventually.
Better to have no heart at all.