salvation [rafe x barry]

time bomb

"If God rewards us on earth for good deeds—the Old Testament suggests it's so, and the Puritans certainly believed it—then maybe Satan rewards us for evil ones."

Rafe Cameron. Brittle thing. Thin cloth of nerves flexed thighty over a body of white rage. His tall figure still seemed too small for the monster hiding underneath. Everything about him was tense, the shoulders, drawn back, the knuckles turning white from clenching his fist, his jaw tightening not necessarily from the never ending anger boiling in his veins but probably from doing too much of that expensive white powder.

He was a nerve wrack. And therefore, easily manipulated. As easily manipulated as a ticking time bomb, which yeah, you might be able to cut the right cable, lucky you, but with the same chance he might blow up in your face.

Ward had liked bombs since he was a little boy. Back when he was living on the cut, unsupervised and bored, he used to collect the leftover fireworks on the 5th of July on Figure 8, built his own little bombs and threw them into his neighbors mailboxes, watched them blow up. Taught himself to built pipe bombs when he grew older, tied one to a cat and watched it run. By the time he was a teenager, he could tell you everything about every possible explosive out there and he used to spent his time sneaking chemicals out of the high school lab. There was just something so comforting in bombs to him. They possessed a power he didn't have back then, a power he longed for.

The police report stated an imperfect gas tank as the cause, when his childhood home blew up only just the day after young Ward graduated high school. The insurance company had to pay, for the shitty little house and for the medical bills until Cecil Cameron passed away months later, succumbing to the effects of smoke inhalation and the chemicals eating at his lungs. It was enough money for Ward to go to college. To start over on a clean slate, rise from the ashes and even enough to add a few chemical engineering classes to his business degree at UNC.

The first company he founded focused on real estate Demolition. Blowing up houses, and the life's of people who got evicted to make room for greater projects than securing housing for the poor: a new golf club, sport resort, shopping mall. And Ward was back to his bombs, fragile projects he handled so carefully, his wife used to mock a women can only dream to be touched as delicately as this and Ward would grab her thigh, soft young skin. I thought you liked it rough.

Rafe was not so different. He, too, needed to be handled carefully, needed to be pointed into the right direction until it was time to diffuse. Ward knew how to handle him, he used to think he was the only one who knew and it was not so much of a choice, having to handle him, anyways. Rafe was a bomb Ward had built with his own hands, he knew that. And he knew, that If it ever came public, the kind of person Rafe was, the sick things that went on on his mind, so would his own wrong doings. Rafe was like a canvas, painted with all of Wards faults and failures and he was frantically afraid that someday, people would see, that someday someone would take a good look at Rafe and see the painter behind him.

Ward hated Rafe for it. Hated Rafe for being so damn sensitive, so malleable to Wards touch. The boy didn't cut him no slack, soaked up every accidental outburst of anger like a sponge ever since he had been a child. He was everything about himself that Ward wanted to keep hidden from the world in flesh and blood.

Now, it was his duty to hide what Rafe had become.

And Ward really tried, tried so hard to give Rafe the support he needed, at least to be stable enough to not ruin everything, again. Ward tried giving Rafe what he thought the boy lacked, showing him he trusted him, and he did, now, that Rafe had proven loyalty so extreme Ward could've never dreamed to ask for; so he showed him how much he trusted him by filling him in on the gold. He tried showing Rafe that he thought he was capable, by telling him he was the reason the gold was saved.