`Never say never ~ Irish

[Brooke Loralei Alvarez]

Brooke absolutely hated winter. Not only did it mean cold weather, which didn’t sit well with a girl built so fine as her, it also meant that her bones stiffened up a lot. The only saving grace was that long sleeves and jerseys made it easier to hide her scars, but everyday life was difficult when you had barely functioning wrists or fingers from arthritis. Not only that, but…Tyler was gone once more, and that made everything harder to deal with too, because she missed him like crazy. No, ‘gone’ didn’t begin to cover it. That made it sound like he’d be back one of these days and things would carry on as they had been between them. ‘Gone’ sounded as though it was another one of those long, miserable breaks that they’d taken before they’d started dating, like the three-month absence when Brooke had disappeared back to Spain because she’d gone out and got drunk with him and ended up at his place and had no idea how to handle that, or the five-year one where Tyler had moved cities without telling her and once more, she’d run straight back to Madrid. Then they’d both turned up here and everything had been perfect for nearly eighteen months. Now Ty had moved cities again, but this time it was final. There was nothing left to say between the two of them. Nothing was what six years of torture and instability had amounted to. Nothing was what all those scars on her back and the pain she had to deal with every day meant. Oh no, she’d never be able to forget Tyler Murray now, even if she wanted to. To be honest, the Spaniard didn’t know if she wanted to or not. The time they’d had together had been amazing, the best of Brooke’s adult life and even though they were done, it hadn’t been an acrimonious kind of parting. They’d just…grown, she guessed. They’d found out that they weren’t the same people as they had been when they’d first met in Virginia as eighteen and twenty year olds, with her fresh out of a glamorous-looking but abusive lifestyle in Spain and Ty as the type of guy she’d never had a chance to know back home. As a result, it had seemed kind of natural for both of them to go their separate ways once more when her ex had said he was thinking of moving states again.

Brooke was happy here; she was an instructor and she was earning enough to keep her and Lex’s menagerie of pets. Her cousin Jax was living here too with his girlfriend and all in all, life was treating her pretty well at the moment but for the snow on the ground. Things would be just about perfect if she could just bring herself to stop being such a coward and show Jax what her younger brother had done to her, but…there was already no love lost between the two men and she didn’t want Raquel to blame her for getting her future husband chucked in jail because he’d gotten involved in purely Alvarez drama.

Such were the thoughts that ran through Bee’s mind as she sat and pondered the more philosophical points of life. Interesting, because usually the twenty-four year old hated abstract things like that, but today seemed like an exception. Her newly bought journal sat in a carrier bag on the floor by her seat; she’d kept to her old habit of buying a new one every time something major happened in her life. There had been a new one only a few days after her father had sold Flight, and then another after she’d turned fourteen and Morgan had started hitting her. Then three in quick succession: When she’d moved to Virginia until the time she’d recovered from the fact she’d slept with a stablehand, another one when she’d moved back to Redwood the second time, and then one for after Ty had left again. That one…that one and the one that told her story from a fourteen to an eighteen year old, they were the ones that held her dirty little secrets. They documented everything Morgan had done (if she could remember when she came round), they had bloodstains all over the pages from the days she just wasn’t able to stop the bleeding…they were everything the woman had been trying to run from for nearly two years. So Brooke sat, turning a cup full of now stone-cold coffee around between her stiff but still-delicate fingers and thinking how far things had gone in ten years.

In terms of looks, Brooke was still as pretty as ever, even if she didn’t believe it. Still though, stiffness was evident in the place of the old grace she used to possess as she stood up and prepared to leave the restaurant. Not thinking, the girl leant over to pick up her bags on the floor – and left herself completely unprepared for the pain shooting through her joints in return. Just managing to grab her things, she straightened up with an audible hiss of pain and turned to leave before anyone could start any awkward questions. And of course, she’d have to walk straight into the person standing behind her, wouldn’t she?

She jumped back immediately, yelping an apology to the person as she pushed her long, dark hair out of her face so she could look up at them. ”Oh, my god! I’m really sorry…”

[Joshua Samuel Grimshaw]

Winter in Texas so far had been extremely mild compared to what Josh usually expected in the season… then again, he had come from England after all and the climates were vastly different. He wasn’t really complaining too much about that fact, it was a nice change from blizzards and feeling like he was going to freeze to death, not to mention the fact that it made driving so much easier, and considering his job mostly consisted of driving too and from the hospital… well, that was definitely helpful. It didn’t stop him from missing home, however, parts of it anyway, but at least he had his sister here to keep his mind off things, for the most part.

Leaving England had probably been the best thing he had done for himself, really. As much as he loved his home country, there was just too much there that wasn’t good for him. Well, Rose was what wasn’t good for him. He probably should have known that from the start, but he had been so convinced with every time that she came back, that things would be different, but they never were. He had just never been the sort of person who gave up on someone easily, although he really probably should have after the first couple of times she had come back, begging him to take her back. But obviously, she couldn’t do that here, and he had been a lot more relaxed, a lot happier, since he had decided to come here. Moving on was a possibility now, and he wanted to. He already had moved on, really.

He’d had a day off that day, heading to the mall to pick up a few things that he needed to get. But first he had stopped by a small restaurant café type shop inside the mall to get a coffee. He had worked the night shift the night before, he had come home and slept enough to keep him fairly alert when he had gotten up, but he’d quickly realised that they were out of coffee at the apartment he currently shared with his sister… a situation he planned on fixing eventually but it wasn’t like they didn’t get along, and right now it kept them both with company, since it was really just them at the moment. Not to mention it was easier on her being able to split rent with him instead of paying it all on her own. So he had made a list of things that they had run out of that they needed, and headed to the local shopping mall as soon as he was ready to go. He ordered his coffee to go, figuring that he may as well get everything over and done with so he would have more time during the day to just relax, although he wasn’t really in a rush to get everything done either, it wasn’t like he was wonting for time.

He had been handed his coffee, stepping back for a moment to check a text Belle had sent him in reply to him sending her one asking if she needed anything while he was out, when he felt someone, much smaller than him, by how it felt, collide with his back. He turned quickly, out of instinct, mostly, to make sure that whoever it had been was alright. “Don’t worry about it, no harm was done, not on my end anyway. Are you alright?” he answered, giving the woman who had run into him a reassuring smile, slipping the phone back into the pocket of his jacket.

[Brooke Loralei Alvarez]

The problem with running into people was that usually they were a great deal more bulky than she was, and also a lot less breakable. There were a few exceptions of course, but this particular time was not one of those. Of course the person she'd collided with this time just had to be about twice her size, so unsurprisingly the impact left her reeling for a couple of seconds. Even as she stepped away from him and started apologising, Brooke's head was still spinning somewhat. Thankfully though, it didn't take long to clear, in time for her to hear him asking if she was alright. The brunette, still with her hand holding her hair out of her face, grinned up at him in return even if it didn't quite reach her eyes. It may seem a strange reaction for somebody usually so uptight, but Brooke had long since learnt that it was an effective way to get people to feel as though they could leave without being seen as an asshole. In all honesty, her ribs were absolutely killing her, but if he was like most other people all he'd want was to hear that she was okay even if he didn't see it.

"Yeah I'm alright," she replied in the kind of voice one might use when they were less okay than they felt but didn't want to show it. All Brooke could do was thank her lucky stars that the internal flinch of pain caused by drawing in air in order to speak stayed very much internal, but for the slight tightening of her hand on her carrier bag. It hadn't taken long for the girl to work out how to show pain without actually allowing other people to see it, and Brooke relied on other people not being observant enough to notice it. What else could she do? People she'd just run into out of pure idiocy didn't need to know why such a small impact had hurt her so much, and they didn't honestly care. Brooke might be distinctly more concerned about standing here and answering his question if she thought he did, because that was when problems came in. Regardless, she still felt that familiar feeling of...not fear as such, but worry. Whenever she did something like this, ran into somebody unexpectedly, Brooke felt the immediate and uncontrollable urge to extricate herself from the situation as fast as possible so that she could go back to disappearing. So yes, she felt like bolting, but she couldn't really do that without coming across as rude. Kind of hoping she'd satisfied his answer, Brooke took another step back, glancing away as she did so in order to avoid running into somebody else in the process - because that would be embarrassing more than anything else - and gave the man she'd run into a slightly more genuine, but also more hesitant, smile. "I'm still sorry," she said in response, more in relation to his comment about no harm being done on his side than anything else. Still feeling slightly like she was fairly obviously bolting, Brooke slowly, if a little stiffly, turned to leave.

(I know this is a pain of answer but Brooke wanted to try bolting sooo xD If it's an issue, feel free to tell me to edit :3 Also, sorry about how long it took. I didn't realise how long it had been :/ )

[Joshua Samuel Grimshaw]

To the untrained eye, Brooke probably would have looked completely fine. But the difference with Josh was, he had been trained to see past the ‘I’m fine’s’ and promises of not being in pain or having anything wrong to see what was really going on. It wouldn’t do him any good in his job if he just took the word of everyone who told him that there was nothing wrong with them, they would end up with a lot more dead or seriously ill people who didn’t get to the hospital for medical treatment in time if he missed everything. And a lot of people liked to think they were okay when they really weren’t, or hid their pain for some other reason or another.

He watched her starting to turn to walk away, suppressing a slight sigh. “Are you really sure?” he asked again, before she had gotten even a few steps away, shifting the hand that his coffee was being held in, not taking his eyes off her just yet. “Sorry, I’m a paramedic. It’s kind of my job to, well, be like this… it’s a hard thing to switch off,” he added, when he realised that he was probably being pushy, guessing that telling her that much was probably enough of an explanation for it in itself. Even before he had become a paramedic, he guessed, it had always been in his nature to look out for people, and make sure that everyone was okay and happy. So even if he hadn’t been, maybe he would be asking the exact same questions, but with less medical knowledge behind them.

Then again, maybe that was his downfall again. Worrying about people too much. Caring about people too much. Look where it had gotten him with Rose. Maybe he needed to lay off it for a bit but… he couldn’t really switch that off so easily. He couldn’t just change who he was and stop caring. At least he knew when the exact limits of when to stop were in these situations, however, so if she told him to sod off he’d shut up. His relationship with his ex, obviously, had been a completely different story, he had been much more personally invested in that, so it had been a lot harder to let go.