i am davidbrothers dotcom

working out kinks, pardon the dust. something similar to this, maybe.

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Carroll was old enough to not let this pissant yuppie act the big dog in a bar that he had no business being in anyway. He was yapping about his stock options or trust fund or whatever at some bird who looked so thin she’d break in a light wind. Another outsider. A couple looking to walk on the wild side for a night, or maybe just lost. Carroll said something in his low growl, decades of smoke and straight whiskey having taken their toll on his throat.

The kid looked at his date and laughed at first. So Carroll said it again, louder, and this time his words hung in the air like a thunder cloud. The kid stood up from the bar, his stool scraping hard against the floor before tipping over. He tugged at the collar of his polo, loosening it, and got in Carroll’s face. He told Carroll to say it again. Carroll looked at the kid, sneered, and did just that.

When Carroll saw this kid—barely out of diapers and drinking vodka, of all things!—snatch a bottle off the bar and swing it at his face, he didn’t even bother to move. He looked the kid dead in his eyes. The bottle hit Carroll just under his left eye with a flat thud. It didn’t break, but it still left a ragged gash on his cheek and snapped his head to the right.

The thing about Carroll is that he was born and raised in the city. His friends, the few that he had left, called him “hard as nails,” but that was underselling it. He grew up on the west side of town, and his family had been there for generations. His great-grandfather, after a particularly rowdy night out on the town, somehow managed to shoot two cops with a third cop’s gun. He did forty years upstate before dying in a cell. Carroll’s grandfather ran protection and broke legs for the then-burgeoning Network. His father robbed cigarette trucks, bars, tourists, and anything else he thought might have cash on-hand.

When Carroll was twelve, he made the mistake of getting caught sneaking a beer out of his father’s stash. The old man bounced Carroll off every wall in the kitchen for that, until a bad spin sent Carroll caroming off the radiator. The cracked skull, detached retina, and two weeks in a drug-induced coma later (“He fell off the fire escape and onto the corner of a dumpster,” his father said, limply) meant that Carroll was in bad shape when he woke up. It took another two weeks in the hospital for observation before they let him go home. Even then, he was facing another six weeks of bandages, casts, and regular physical therapy.

Carroll came out of his coma different. He’d sustained some type of brain damage. He didn’t remember what type, just that the doctor said a really long word with a concerned face. His nerves were bad, or disrupted, or something. The net result was a decreased sense of touch. Carroll didn’t feel it when the doctors prodded him or poked him with needles. He wasn’t numb. He could still tell when you touched him. It just felt like there was a thin filter between the act and the feeling. It took a lot to get a rise out of him. It took even more to hurt him.

A month after he got back from the hospital, Carroll pulled on a ski mask over his bandages and waited in the alley outside his building for his father to return. When his father finally stumbled home, still drunk at 6 in the morning, Carroll stepped out of the shadows, stretched up to push the gun against the side of his head, and pulled the trigger. The old man was dead before he felt the heat of the tip of the gun. Carroll had held it so close while he waited for his father that it was warm. Carroll would have sworn that it was burning hot when he pulled the trigger. He stashed the gun at home. Nobody would miss his pops, except maybe his moms. The cops considered the investigation dead in the water after a cursory effort.

Word got around. Years passed.

Carroll grew more out than up. He was 5’10” on a good day, but comfortably broad for his height. He reached his peak height around 15, and by that point, a few of his father’s old friends came knocking. Carroll had a rep for fighting in school, apparently having taken on the worst of his father’s habits after his death, and these fellows thought they could aim that violence toward more profitable ends.

And focus it they did. For the next thirty years, Carroll spent the majority of his time hurting other people and being hurt. He spent eight of them behind bars, but that only served to increase his legend. He was a one-man wrecking machine, and more than willing to bleed just to make someone else bleed more. The brain damage made Carroll tougher than most, and a nasty demeanor did the rest.

His father would’ve been proud, or maybe just jealous. Carroll grew up hard, and as a result, he hit harder than his father ever did and managed to inherit most of his friends, too. If you ever needed someone to catch a body, Carroll was your man. He was good for nothing but brute force, but he got the job done.

Now, though, he was mostly retired. He did most of his drinking in The Spot, where the craggy bartender let him drink for free. Half of the bartender’s scars were due to Carroll, in fact. They grew up around the corner from each other, and that meant that they fought each other, too. The bartender was a scraggly, scrawny teenager, but a scrapper. He was never any match for Carroll, though. In their old age, long past their prime, they’d become quiet friends.

The kid was surprised that Carroll didn’t even so much as fall. He was expecting the bottle to break, but that didn’t happen either. Carroll reached out with one filthy, weathered hand and grabbed the kid by the hair. He slammed the man onto the bartop, shattering a shot glass in the process. He pulled him off the bar and hit him twice in the face. Carroll watched as the man fell to the ground, his face shattered and barely conscious. The date was long-gone, having hit the door as soon as the kid swung the bottle.

Nobody else in the bar said a word, though they all watched. A wave of laughter washed over the bar as Carroll turned around to finish his drink and security came to escort the man out. Everybody in The Spot had a Carroll story. Stick around long enough and he’d lose his temper on some loser.