2020-08-13 - A thousand sharpened nails

His left shoulder is on fire, so are both of his legs and his chest, and he's buried under a crushing blackness that--

No. No, he's lying on the floor of his cabin's living room, the last light of a late summer night fading from the sky in the windows overhead. He's in agony, like he had been that day, and he's pretty sure people have died whom he could have saved if he'd been allowed to, and--

--he's bleeding. His sweats are ruined, rent into ribbons. Blood's getting all over the floor. His whole body aches, like he'd been beaten from the inside by a legion of bat-wielding miscreants.

He lays there, unable to muster the energy to do anything else. Even thinking seems out of reach. Existing is what he's got. Breathing.

How long had he been in there? God, Thorne and Kip, were they--had they made it out? He'd intended to look for them, except the way out of the cell had been out of everything. So why hadn't he broken the fucking windows, Thorne had been right there and then they could have found Kip and escaped.

But he knows the answer to that: he'd been too focused on destroying what they'd used to torment him. There's always been a limit to how much of Bosnia he can remember without going from hurting to righteously pissed off and they'd found it. Found it, and worse, rewarded it. It had felt so perfect, tearing up those Corpse Trees, setting them on fire, hating what's torn him up inside and out for years and years. It'd been the best feeling in the universe destroying it all.

Nausea grips him. He'd let them amplify something he's always hated about himself: that when he gets angry, truly good and furious, he sets aside everything decent and tears things to pieces until whatever has him angry just fucking stops.

His stomach protests these thoughts. Christ, can he make it to the bathroom in time?

It's a near thing. He sags back from the toilet, aching back against the cool ceramic of the soaking tub. There's a trail of blood leading from the living room to the tiles here now. Ellie's going to love coming home to that.

Oh God, Eleanor. What's she going to think when he tells her he abandonned two people in one of Their prisons? How could she want to marry someone like that. Someone who prioritizes lashing out in anger over other people's survival.

He has to lay back down. His head is throbbing and he feels dizzy. So he curls up on the bathroom floor. He's going to start crying any second now, and probably isn't going to stop for a while. But maybe he can get it all out and clean up the blood before Eleanor comes back from work. Maybe.

The cool tile numbs a little of the pain, is a relief to his battered skin. He stares at the vague reflection of his own face in the curve of the tub, seeing himself twenty years ago doing much the same thing as he is right now. How many emotional breakdowns had he had like this? God, so many, in that first year. A lot of glass had broken. A lot of it.

"I wanted the past to go away," he says to himself. His voice is hoarse, like he's been yelling. "I wanted to leave it, like another country."

Ha. No, he knows how it is. Like...Persephone. That's her name. The one who ate the pomegranate seeds. (Pomegranate, one of the seven species.) You never leave hell. You take it with you. So you learn to live there.

There it is. Silent, hot tears at first; eventually kind of sobbing no one likes to see, no one likes seen. He wraps his good, unslung arm over his head and stays that way for a while. (He tries to remember that he has to clean this all up before Eleanor comes home.)

He thinks he hears his aunt's voice, just before he falls asleep from sheer exhaustion.

Also I wanted to be able to love. And we all know how that one goes, don’t we?

Slowly.