a/n: garraty is actually fairly untouched in this fandom and i thought i might try to get a handle on his character. he's a surprisingly hard character to get into the head of.

disclaimer: the long walk is not mine.

He dreams about clouds.

They drift across the blue palette of the sky in long, wisps of white evaporated water. He's firmly anchored on the ground, during every dream, and is only looking up at the sky above.

He's only ever had one nightmare. And that was the dream when the ground was no longer underneath his feet, when he was on the level of the clouds. This one is the only dream he truly is afraid of, when he closes his eyes at night.i

The expression 'head in the clouds' sends shivers down his spine.

x

His brother's eyes are cloud-colored. His cheeks have gone up in flames, his eyes have lost all the brightness inside of them. Not that he was ever very bright or very active, he can hear his mother murmuring that he was always fragile. Through his eyes, fragility is a way to earn pity and attention.

He doesn't know a lot about illness at this age, but he knows that this isn't right. His breathing is heavy and ragged, he can hear the water inside his brother's chest sloshing around and choking his lungs.

He insists on sleeping in the same room as his brother. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, the wet, heavy breathing ceases and gives way to a peaceful night.

x

He's five years old now, staring into Jimmy Owens' grinning face. He's never thought about bodies before, how boys and girls must differ somehow. Jimmy is his source of a knowledge, he's a good boy and doesn't do wrong, but Jimmy, Jimmy is the type of boy to lead around a troupe of little boys and tell them how they were made.

He knows that it's harmless and they're only playing, but somehow he can't help but feel himself tingle, feel some sort of sense of wrong-ness along with a very stark right-ness. Girls can't be as good as boys down there. Boys are all he knows how to think about.

Later, his mother shakes her finger at him and tells him what he's done wrong and he cowers from a monster that he can't find under his bed.

x

A few days later, his father comes home half-drunk, like he always is. He sits down on the couch, telling raunchy stories with jabs at the government mixed in.

He loves his father, but sometimes he terrifies him. The smell of alcohol on his skin has always made him shrink back from his father, as though if he touches his father, he'll smell polluted too.

Because that's really what he's afraid of. Dirtiness. Pollution. His clean-cut world becoming rough around the edges.

When the soldiers knock at the door, he hides behind his crying mother and his father goes willingly. He vaguely recalls a TV special about the military that he and Jimmy had watched. He'd seen the man's brains go splat against a wall.

But nothing like that could ever happen to his daddy. Tragedy is only for the people on the television.

x

Making Jimmy Owens cry and clutch his head might not have been on-purpose. But it might not have been an accident. Because Jimmy was bad, Jimmy taught him things that he wasn't supposed to know. He was dirty and he'd made him dirty too.

His mother had lectured him again, but something in him knew that she was secretly proud of her son. She ran her hands through his yellow hair, whispered an apology of sorts to him, and went to go talk to Jimmy's mother.

The Owens family moved away, and he found himself sitting on the patch of hill above the baseball diamond, trying to see if he could somehow conjure up Jimmy beside him.

x

He's thirteen, now, a man, or at least that's what he thinks. Their household of two is tense, and he's stuck in the phase where no one understands what's going through his head, even though every adult has been there before.

He looks in the mirror one day, and finds his blond hair taking a brown tint. No matter how many times he washes it, the brown will never leave his hair. A sudden panic reminds him of the hazy days when he was younger, of Jimmy Owens and dirtiness and down there. So he scrubs his hair harder, like that will somehow help.

Later his mother hands him a book about growing up, about the way bodies fluctuate and become misshapen and then magically put themselves back together.

Needless to say, it doesn't help.

x

He meets Jan in his sophomore year. Jan is pretty, Jan is untouchable, and he finds some sort of sanctuary in watching her walk the halls. The horrible, black growing up-thing that has dotted his face with acne and turned his hair darker hasn't even remotely hurt her.

When they start being seen together, he finds a sense of security. With Jan, the dirty, horrible feelings inside him go away, at least momentarily. It's not attraction, not really, more like a sense of comfort. He'd kiss her just because he could, just to show the world that he could, to prove to some Jimmy Owens out there that he was clean.

He was Maine's own quintessential boy. He had a girl, he had friends, or at least some. He was just like everybody else, and he'd grow up to be a carbon copy of everybody else.

x

When he sees the poster advertising the Long Walk blowing down the street after being ripped from a telephone pole, he doesn't pay any heed. He traps it underneath his sneaker, stares down at it, at the smeared ink on the image of The Major pointing straight at him.

The words are bullshit, really. Lies and bullshit. Because he remembers watching a Long Walk, in that time when his father was still there. It'd been horrible, the Walkers had been screaming.

During English class that day, the word written on the board is 'sense of self.' He wonders where his has gone. He recalls the Long Walk, how horrifying it was.

And it hits him that it's all about sense of self, and maybe the last thing he can do is liberate his torn-up, broken mother from having to deal with him.

x

He never felt a conscious need to die, and denies that he ever had one. Suicidal feelings are only in books, tragedy can't happen to him. Tragedy always happens to the other guy.

Suddenly he thinks of Jimmy Owens, at sixteen, and wonders if he really did mean to hit him. If he wanted to end it, to end the new, abnormal feelings entering his five-year-old body. And he realizes that if he lives past sixteen, he'll have to feel them again. Someday he'll have to face them.

So he writes the essay, goes through with the physical, makes Walking his goal, never really consciously thinking about why. Jogging and lifting and scratching long, complex sentences on why he feels qualified, or at least why he thinks The Major will buy that he's qualified.

His mother cries, Jan cries, even his mother's 'special friend' cries for him. He tells them that he doesn't know why he did it, and he starts to believe it himself.

He does his best to forget why he's there, that dirty, dirty feeling and the idea that his town and his family would be better off without him in the end, even if they don't know it. And then, once he's on the asphalt of the road, ready to start walking, he looks into Peter McVries' eyes and remembers.