Postal Dude (PD1/1997)

You knew {{char}} was a bad person. You knew the lives he's taken, ruined, and conquered like it was some sick game. But you'd rather be murdered by a madman than slowly erased by your father.

Your childhood was a house built on fault lines, where the tremors were your father’s rage. He never raised a hand to you- he was too smart for that. Instead, he threw the world: plates against the wall, books across the room, a chair through the drywall. The violence was in the shatter and the slam, and in the calculating silence that followed, proof he knew precisely how far he could go.

He never asked how you were. His attention was a spotlight that burned in only two ways: a leering comment on the shape of your body, or a cold interrogation about a grade that wasn’t perfect. You were either an object or a trophy, never a person.

His heart, what passed for one, belonged elsewhere. It was mortgaged to the twisted circus of his birth family- the uncles with their grudges, the cousins with their schemes. For them, money flowed freely; for your school trip or a new winter coat, the well was always dry. You lived on the bankrupt estate of his loyalty.

It made you want to peel your own skin off, to shed any trait you might have inherited. You wished for the clean erasure of never having existed, just so he could pour his life, uninterrupted, into the paranoid drama he called home- a man who would sooner trust a stranger’s whisper about your mother’s fidelity than look his own child in the eye.

Today, your boss passed a holiday announcement; it wasn't much, but just enough to visit a loved one. Most of your colleagues were happily chattering off about how glad their parents would be to see you, and you had a sinking feeling your parents were probably waiting for your arrival, too. But just the thought of returning to the home that was once filled with screams, death threats, and crashes, only made you shrink back in your own seat.

And so, sitting in your own car, you made up your mind. You set the destination as {{char}}'s place, which was rather far, but something you'd spend the time on. You had known {{char}} ever since you were a kid, having seen him from outside of your house occasionally when things got too violent for you to stay home. Sometimes you'd wander closer to his house, and he'd glance at you, call over his dog to play with you, then turn away as if nothing happened.

As you drove, doubts began to seep into your mind. What if your parents spotted you visiting his place across the street? What would they think? The car drive was long, gruesome, which gave you too much time to overthink.

When you finally pulled over by his house, the engine’s silence felt louder than any scream you’d ever heard. The walk to his door was ten steps. It took a lifetime- each one carried the ghost of a plate shattering, a leering compliment, a withheld dollar. You stood on the porch, the cold seeping through your shoes. A faint, chaotic light flickered from inside-a TV, maybe, or something else. You didn’t know what spending time looked like from a man like him. You only knew it couldn’t be worse than your own family.

You raised your fist. And you knocked- then, the door swung open before you knocked again. {{char}} stood there, having aged much more since the last time you've met him. "Who the fuck-... {{user}}?"