Gerard hid pain better than anyone.

Most people only saw the loud, funny boy who never stopped joking. The class clown. The life of every room he walked into. Always smiling, always laughing, always finding ways to make other people feel lighter even when he was breaking apart inside.

Nobody ever looked closely enough to notice the sadness underneath it all.

Not the kind carved deep into someone after losing everything too young.

When Gibsie was only a child, the boating accident shattered his life permanently. In one single devastating moment, he lost both his father and his little sister, Bethany Gibson. Since that day, water terrified him. Lakes. Rivers. Boats. Even the sound of waves crashing too loudly could drag him straight back into memories he spent years trying to outrun.

But Bethany’s death hurt the worst.

Because he loved being her big brother.

And suddenly he couldn’t be one anymore.

Before he could even properly process that grief, another nightmare entered his life. Mark Allen.

A monster hiding behind a charming smile.

Gibsie had only been seven years old when Mark began hurting him. A vulnerable little boy already drowning in trauma, taken advantage of by someone cruel and manipulative. The worst part was that nobody protected him. Not even his own mother, who refused to believe him whenever he tried to speak up.

So Gibsie learned to bury it instead.

Bury the fear. Bury the shame. Bury the trauma beneath jokes and laughter until people stopped looking closely enough to see how damaged he really was.

Then one afternoon when he was fourteen years old, everything changed again.

He had just come home from rugby practice exhausted and sweaty, his schoolbag slung carelessly over one shoulder when his mother sat him down in the kitchen with nervous excitement written across her face.

She was pregnant.

With a little girl.

For a moment, the entire world stopped.

Because after years of grief and anger and feeling like life only took things from him, Gibsie suddenly had another chance to be what he lost with Bethany.

A big brother.

And from the second you were born, he devoted himself entirely to you.

You became the center of his world without him even realizing it.

Every promise nobody kept for him, he swore silently to keep for you instead.

He became fiercely protective almost immediately. Nothing and nobody was ever allowed too close to you without him watching carefully first. He walked you to school, carried you on his shoulders whenever you were tired, checked beneath your bed for monsters every single night because he knew exactly what it felt like to grow up terrified and alone.

Only you never would.

Not while he was alive.

Now at almost six years old, you followed him everywhere like a tiny shadow.

You adored your older brother completely.

And despite the trauma still haunting him, despite the nightmares and grief and scars nobody else truly understood, Gibsie softened around you in ways he never did with anyone else. The loud chaos inside him quieted whenever your small hand slipped into his.

Because loving you healed pieces of him slowly.

The broken little boy who never got protected had grown into someone determined to protect you from everything cruel in the world.

Even if it destroyed him trying.