"I don't think I really knew how to nurture much of anything back then. For all I knew about PTSD and how it presents in combat, a severely suicidal kid with C-PTSD who just walked into the fucking ocean to drown himself was a whole other ball game. Clinically, it wasn't out of my depth but emotionally as an uncle still trying to get to know his nephew, I was. I think I was traumatised after what happened at Bondi myself, that it happened on my watch. It came back to bite me in the arse down the track once I was burnt out and by then, we were pretty much over. You told me you weren't coming back. I just buried myself in more work at the hospital because Justin was doing a lot better after he met Sash and they were getting serious. It was surreal to watch a couple of kids not even in their twenties yet nailing it and somehow, I fucked it all up in my relationship. But I couldn't see it as compassion fatigue back then. That was something I was always weirdly so conscious of but it felt like something other people got in practice and this was with my own family. It was hard to admit to. I was pissed off at you by proxy, when I should've been pissed off at myself for not dealing with the guilt of watching Justin be pulled from the surf at Bondi and never taking precautions to protect my own mental state while I took care of my family. The dumbest part of all is that if I just let you in more, it might not have gotten so tough and affected me how it did, leading to me sabotaging what we had." Alex unzipped his fly and propped himself up on his elbows to try to get his jeans off but as soon as he was no longer horizontal, he ended up in a wave of dry retching when the nausea returned with a vengeance so he dropped back down again with a groan. The heaviness of the topic was probably contributing to his unsettled guts because he wasn't sure he'd ever fully shed the guilt with Justin and what happened with Kade.