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Prison life is so rote, so regimented. Every minute of each day so carefully planned out ... which is a blessing and a curse.
It's the latter right now for Al Rothstein as he lays in his bunk, arms tucked behind his head, and stares up at the grey cement of the ceiling. He's stuck on thoughts he doesn't want to have, and his instinct is to get up, walk down the halls, knock on a few doors, and see if somebody's up for having a chat during that bleak and needy time of night his mother called "the Hour of the Wolf".
Only here, that's called an escape attempt and would be extremely counterproductive to what he's trying to accomplish in his life right now.
But he can't stop thinking about Teth Adam and ...
... how he tried so damn hard to push the man away at first. Tried so damn hard to fight the way he was drawn to him. Did his level best to get him thrown out of the JSA. (Was it the fact of how things had just gone down with Todd that made it harder to say no? Or the mess with Extant? Or how finally getting into the JSA still wasn't enough, and he felt so directionless and bereft? Were these the reasons, or at least, part of them?)
And finally, in the middle of a fight (oh, how ironic!) he gave up fighting it, let himself be drawn to Teth Adam the way a moth is drawn to a flame and the rest ... is history.
The rest, what his life was like in Kahndaq, after, just made it all better and worse. (Because if he had .just. not. leaned. into that hand on his shoulder, that one night, not nuzzled his head up against Teth Adam .... It might have been so much somewhat easier.)
Shit. His whole world had just been upended, and he latched on to the love and affection Teth Adam offered, dove straight into the flames. He was so damn tired of feeling sad and alone, and how bitterly funny it was he should end up falling into bed with the the co-author of said unhappiness. (And ohgod, it was so fierce and so good between them).
In the end, not even that was enough to overcome the things tearing him apart inside.
(How can you love another person if you can't even love yourself? What do you do when the things in life that give you the most happiness remind you of the things that cause you the most pain? How can you fall into bed with the 'co-author' of your unhappiness and somehow think you wouldn't write a few more chapters all the more exquisitely painful now that intimacy had been added to the mix?)
Al sucks in a deep breath, holds it, and lets it out. Goddamn he wishes he could leave his cell and talk to somebody about this whole tangled mess of love and shame. Talking about this in the morning, during the daylight, with his therapist (who's nice, really, and who has helped him with a lot of things) won't be quite the same. It's a professional relationship, and the rules for that are different than the rules between friends and lovers.
He doesn't see any other way this could have played out.
The future's not looking too bright, either.
And still he thinks of Teth Adam, and hopes that someday the man will understand what drove his choice ... and forgive him.