Brody O'Rourke [Peacekeeper]

The last decade and some change have been a period of great upheaval for the former Peacekeeper Sergeant.

After a lifetime dedicated to sports and martial arts, throwing himself mind, body and spirit into the Peacekeepers and having believed he would spend the rest of his career in the military, Brody thought he had his life figured out and on track. And he did, really; he'd never yet encountered a stumbling block he couldn't work past, learning and adapting and overcoming one obstacle after another, only reinforcing the subconscious idea that he was invincible.

And like Icarus flying too close to the sun, when he fell, he hit the ground hard.

A bullet wound to the stomach wasn't enough to take Brody's life, thanks in no small part to the girl he'd thrown himself in front of that bullet for, Kyanite Ruze, and the boy who just weeks ago had dashed Brody's hopes for him as a Peacekeeper, Matthew Dunham. Brody awoke days later in the hospital after surviving by the narrowest of margins, shaken and weak but insisting with a morphling-hazy smile that he was too stubborn to die.

It seemed, once he was cleared to go home, that once his body healed that things would go back to normal.

Only... that's not how it happened.

Brody's parents didn't hesitate to welcome their son back into his childhood home where he would be loved and cared for and protected. Where, of all places, he ought to feel the safest. But even as his body healed, his mind had begun playing cruel tricks on him. Becoming easily startled, suddenly having trouble remembering the play of events, night terrors that woke him up screaming in the middle of the night. The monster that had shot him was dead, but not gone; now the monster lived inside Brody's head.

Unfortunately, this made him unfit to continue to be a Peacekeeper, and to Brody's anguish, he was medically discharged. Though he was continuing to attend therapy, his future was very suddenly, very uncertain; Brody was unmoored, and despite the best efforts of friends and family to help him find a new direction, nobody was quite sure how (or if) he was going to bounce back.

When Matthew Dunham quietly disappeared from the picture, Brody was despondent. The people that loved him most worried he might fall apart entirely, and feared finding out what that might entail.

What ultimately saved Brody from self-destruction was music.

One of the things that still brought him joy even in what he refers to as the darkest days of his life, was to hear buskers playing in the park near the hospital where Brody attended therapy, and would spend much of his now-overabundant free time listening. What prompted him to try for himself, however, was a bit of an unexpected source.

A friend had given him a hand instrument while bedridden at the hospital to pass the time; Brody was by no means an expert, but by the time he was released to his parents' care had at least figured out from a lesson booklet how to pluck out a smattering of simple nursery songs. For a long time, it remained in his bedside drawer, not forgotten but silent. In the days and months after the shooting, Brody and the girl he protected, Kyanite, came to bond over the incident and over their mutual loss of Matthew. Mira, Kyanite and Matthew's daughter, was a frequent guest at the O'Rourke household where Brody's father Nolan delighted in coddling the child (giving Kyanite a much-needed break from being a young single mother). Brody had gone to fetch his instrument to distract and de-stress from the baby's crying, plucking out a simple melody... And gradually, the baby's wailing stopped. The simple act of being able to soothe Mira, Brody will admit, was the most accomplished he had felt in a long time.

Still with far too much free time on his hands, a bit of the old Brody started to shine through as he poured himself into music with the same intensity and zeal he'd once devoted to earning the coveted spot of tribute, to the Olympics, to becoming a Peacekeeper. He was hardly a natural, but made up for it with the sheer number of hours spent practicing, sometimes until his fingers were raw and his joints ached.

Music became an outlet for the intense emotions that his trauma had burdened him with; instead of eating him alive, he poured out his grief and his pain out onto keys and strings and made them beautiful. With time, those started to diminish, making room for the things they had hidden in their depths; pleasure, joy, even a sense of hope. His future was still uncertain, but at least now, Brody was certain that he had one. And as Brody slowly pieced himself back together, with therapy and the love of his family to a soundtrack of increasingly skillful piano, guitar and kalimba, it helped form the foundation of his relationship with the baby for whom the fateful bullet had been meant.