Posted on

indinajones:

like GOD gray was jack’s brother he was the kid jack grew up playing catch with and fighting over the tv remote with and heckling while he was doing homework and kicking and punching and hugging and having the kind of closeness that only siblings have – and then having that ripped away, realizing the absence of his hand in jack’s when they were fleeing for their lives and the singular instinct was to run, the terrible knowledge of not-thereness stretching from seconds of panic to minutes to hours to years and the sinking, awful knowledge that what was happening to him must have been soul-breaking. gray was jack’s responsibility, his little brother, the first person he ever lost and jack’s only link to home – and more than that, even, jack’s only link to a time when he was normal, when he was alive in a way that didn’t feel unnatural and wrong and unreal, when he was a part of the mundane and the ordinary world. he’ll never have that again. 

and we don’t think what gray’s reaction to seeing jack again must have done to him, both in the short term and the long – jack lost gray’s love and he lost his trust, he lost gray’s unique dependence on him as a brother, he looked into gray’s eyes and found in them anger and brokenness and resentment for jack, his own blood, who had let go of his hand, however blamelessly, and condemned him to a fate in which his spirit had been snapped and allowed to fester with hate and blame. by that, by the knowing of that, jack lost whatever he had left of his original personness. he lost whatever remained of his ordinariness. that’s got to be a terrible, terrible blow to weather, especially for jack, who must have clung to the hope that somewhere out there in time and space his brother was alive, his brother was alive and happy and normal (please god, jack might have thought in a moment of weakness, let him be normal) and that perhaps gray looked up at the stars and remembered his brother and thought, wherever you are, i hope you’re all right. i forgive you. gray couldn’t forgive him and you can see the degree to which the loss of jack’s last vestige of his home – more than his home, his family and his childhood and his entire could-have-been life – utterly breaks him.