For Reasons Wretched and Divine

Through Sunshine's eyes and Let me Sympathize

*****Trigger warning, panic attacks.****

Sometimes, it got too loud.

It wasn't often. Happy had a handle on things, the Tacoma Killer didn't break, but sometimes he chipped.

No walls have ever been infallible; every great stronghold has been breached.

Nights like these, the bad nights, he was a restless mass of energy. No part of his house wasn't paced; his arms were itched raw, scalp scrubbed with blunt nails.

Onion hated the loud nights. Happy hated that he noticed. The white pitbull would sit and watch him for hours, growling at the demons that rattled in Happy's head.

Tonight, it was one of the worst since he was all alone, before the club, before Onion, before he knew that people could like him just fine, even with his occupation and his blunt personality.

The faces on his stomach burned, the voices of the damned hissing at him in the dark, and he absently scratched at them, willing them to keep their voices down.

He wasn't ashamed of what he did, his job was as necessary as any other, or at least that's how he justified it. Seldom did he ever have to justify it to himself. There wouldn't be a need for the Tacoma killer if people didn't need the Tacoma killer.

Supply and demand, the cycle of commerce.

Happy figured he was just as brutal as any other corporation, even though the product was first-degree murder.

The knobs of the kitchen cabinet clacked down the knocks in his spine like ladder rungs as he slid to the floor, knees tucked under his chin.

He couldn't breathe, and what little oxygen he was getting was in short hard bursts that ripped open his chest like fire.

Onion whined, heavy paw crushing the top of his foot as the beast wiggled in closer, snuffling against his buzzed head.

With a shaking body, he let Onion worm his way in, even though the process of calling his limbs back to him was an agonizing one. Onion was in need of a good scrub down. Happy determined this in the infinitesimal part of his brain that was coherent as he buried his face into the slobbering dog's neck, arms looped around his neck. He was probably squeezing too hard, but the pittie wasn't protesting, so he latched onto the tether of reality.

Time didn't exist for him, sitting in the dark, holding his dog, battling for each breath, every heartbeat ricocheting in his head like a gunshot.

In the dark, his phone pinged, lighting up the room in its blinding glow. He couldn't remember where he had dropped it in his endless pacing.

His head snapped, fight or flight kicking in at the sudden noise, momentarily overriding the boiling panic in his body.

Onion shuffled with him to the phone, a slow-moving eight-limbed creature.

He collapsed on the floor next to the device, grunting as Onion stepped on his stomach while he settled himself overtop him.

Text message from: Sunshine

Happy blinked, unsure if he had read that correctly. He had never hallucinated from a panic attack before, but he didn't put it past the realm of possibility.

He clicked on the message, fingers trembling too hard to hold the phone properly.

It was a picture.

Happy struggled to focus his eyes, the brown blur of the picture slowly coming into center.

It was the puppy, Peaches, sitting on a kitchen floor like he was, head cocked to the side at something Sunshine was saying.