Chapter Text
There’s blood positively pouring from both of her arms. At this point he’s on the verge of just grabbing her wrists and forcing her to stay still while he makes a rough attempt at cleaning it up, and the only thing stopping him is the knowledge that instinct might take over if he does so and prompt her to accidentally elbow him in the face. “Are you sure you don’t want to --”
“Looks worse than it is,” she snaps. To demonstrate, she wipes her arm on her tights, and once it’s not actively covered in wet blood it doesn’t look quite as bad. “Besides, cleaning it would sting like a bitch.”
BoJack raises an eyebrow. “And you want to avoid pain, so you … ?”
She chuckles nervously. “You wouldn’t get it,” she says, in a very patronizing tone of voice. “Besides, you were the one that wouldn’t let me keep raiding Coral’s cupboards, because apparently that’s ‘rude’ and ‘not how you act when you’re a guest in someone’s house’ and whatever other bullshit.”
“Yeah, you really overstayed that welcome.” He groans. “Our train’s still fifteen minutes away, so I probably have time to head to the convenience store. They might have antiseptic there, or at least, like, a comically large amount of band-aids.”
“Mm,” murmurs Sarah Lynn in agreement. She curls up on the train station bench; it’s been a few days since she got any sleep at all and longer since she got enough. “Mmf, I’m so tired. Get me something sugary while you’re there.”
BoJack raises an eyebrow. “You want sugar to keep you awake?” He stares at her incredulously. “As opposed any of the better stimulants that are readily available to us? Like coffee, or amphetamines, or coffee laced with amphetamines?”
“Mmm, I don’t want coffee. Or amphetamines. Or coffee laced with amphetamines.” She groans. “It’d take too long to crush the pills and snort them. Just get me an overpriced shitty donut, ‘kay?”
BoJack sighs. “...Okay.”
He stands up, and begins the walk to the closest convenience store. There’s a twinge of something in him when he thinks back on the last few minutes, on his reluctance to press Sarah Lynn further. It’s not regret -- that would be stupid, because if he’s so regretful about not doing enough to help her then he can just help her later, once he’s back.
It might, of course, be guilt. Guilt, however, would be equally stupid. He knows there’s nothing he could do to stop her at this point.
Herb cleared his throat unnaturally loudly. “Sarah Lynn, this is an intervention.”
Sarah Lynn opened her mouth to protest, and then her head fell face-first into the table. She had told BoJack and Herb she was experiencing a lot of daytime sleepiness as a side effect of some new medication she was adjusting to, which was technically true. The drugs she had stolen from that house party and stashed away in her home were used as medication, maybe, in a vastly different form, for a medical condition she didn’t have. With great difficulty, she managed to remove her head from the table. “I don’t need an intervention.”
“Bullshit,” said BoJack.
Sarah Lynn pouted. “Why would I need an intervention in 2007, which is the current year?”
Herb raised an eyebrow at her. “Well,” he began. “Uh, recently you got super stressed out about that concert you had, announced your earlier retirement from music for no reason, came over, got wasted, drunkenly told us that your manager had pressured you to quit ‘while you were ahead’ because you were, and I quote, ‘getting old’, and also told us that the nude pics that were used to promote the concert were both taken and leaked without your consent, and, uh … you’ve just been … in our house … ever since.”
“I know,” she snapped. “I was there.”
“Oh my God,” groans BoJack. “Let’s quit beating around the bush. Show us your arms.”
Sarah Lynn gulped. She had been sure she’d done a good job. Herb had been all too willing to dismiss her sudden love of long-sleeved shirts as a side effect of not wanting to be so exposed after her nudes were leaked, which was partially true, and when she did have to roll her sleeves up, she had an excellent strategy to get away with it. She would turn the kitchen lights off when she went in, and then when someone came in and asked why she was washing the dishes in the dark, she would stop them from turning the light on by saying it was a lot of effort to wash the dishes in total darkness, and if the light went on now then all of the effort she had put in would be in vain. It worked surprisingly well.
But, Herb and Bojack were just too smart for her.
Reluctantly, she rolled up her sleeves. It looked worse than it was because she had spent the last several days telling herself she would wash the cuts the next time she showered as though she wasn’t fully aware that she was too depressed to shower. Herb reached out to grab her arm and she recoiled away on instinct.
“Okay, yeah,” said Herb. “That’s a mess. You’ve gotta wash that.”
She crossed her arms stubbornly and pouted. “That’ll sting like a bitch.”
“As opposed to creating the cuts, which I’m sure was completely painless,” snarked BoJack. “Quit making excuses and let us help you.”
“No,” she said bluntly.
Herb blinked. “No?”
“No,” she repeated. “I don’t want help.” She didn’t say that she didn’t need help, because that would cross the line from mere deception into outright lies. “And I don’t want to wash my arms, okay? I’ll do it next time I shower.”
“And when are you planning on showering?”
“When circumstances force me to.”
BoJack narrowed his eyes. “Are you using living in filth and risking infection as a method of extra self-harm to add to the very literal self-harm that you’re also doing?”
“No,” she snaps. “I just don’t want you to make me do shit. And, like I keep saying, it would hurt.”
“You do this specifically to cause pain and you expect us to believe you’re avoiding fixing it because it would hurt?”
She glared. “I’m not doing it specifically to cause pain.” At their raised eyebrows, she added, “I’m doing it because my whole life is spiraling out of control, and I need to prove that I can change things, even if it’s for the worse, okay?” She stood up. “This intervention is dumb. Go suck each other’s dicks or something.” And with that, she made a swift exit.
BoJack groaned. “Well, maybe we will, then!”
He goes through his pockets as he walks to the convenience store. He automatically panics when he can’t find his wallet, but then he finds it sticky-taped to the inside of his left jacket sleeve along with a post-it note saying you got PRANKED, future bojack in his own barely legible writing. He scoffs. “Past me is an idiot. That’s a shit prank.” He opens his wallet, and discovers another note inside it. This note has no meaningful message scrawled onto it, only the lyrics to Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up. “...God dammit.”
He smacks himself in the forehead, then tosses the note on the ground and checks his wallet for spare change. When he doesn’t find any, he decides to just use his card.
The convenience store doesn’t have any antiseptic, not that he can find, and the hand sanitizer would probably would but it is so overpriced, the sort of overpriced where even someone living in poverty could probably set aside a few bucks to afford it, but it feels like such a huge price for such a tiny bottle that even a millionaire would be reluctant to actually buy it.
So, he heads for the band-aids. Band-aids, of course, aren’t the official term; some company had their heads so far up their asses that they trademarked the name, and they’re yet to remove their heads from their asses, so while they’re punished by having their own shit down their own throats, other companies are punished by being forced to refer to what everyone knows are band-aids as ‘adhesive medical strips’ or some equally dumb bullshit. It’s all bullshit.
The band-aids -- that is, the ones that he’s legally allowed to refer to as band-aids, which is dumb because they’re all band-aids -- are, of course, ridiculously overpriced. This is somewhat surprising to BoJack. He had assumed that they would be cheap, since the people in charge of selling them hadn’t removed their heads from their own asses once during the entire last thirty years of inflation. But he can’t be bothered giving them five goddamn dollars for a pack of band-aids, so he gets the cheap ones even though the cheap ones are actually ‘adhesive medical strips’.
He also grabs himself a coffee, while he’s there, even though it’s shitty convenience store coffee that tastes piss. It’s also overpriced, again, but this time he doesn’t care, purely because there’s no cheaper option. He does, however, get it with full cream milk instead of skim purely out of spite toward whichever total asswad decided that the skim milk at the convenience store should just be water with extra steps -- if he’s going to pay three entire dollars for this coffee, then he had better get his three dollars worth of calcium, god dammit.
As an afterthought, he grabs a comically large amount of alcohol and cigarettes as he pays. The cashier doesn’t even bother to get his ID, presumably recognising him as the star of the sitcom that likely defined this guy’s childhood. He doesn’t say a word of politeness during the entire transaction; just pays up and leaves.
He sure hopes the reason he wasn’t asked to provide ID was because the cashier recognised him, and not just because he’s visibly getting old. At times like this, when he’s with Sarah Lynn, he likes to think of all the many children who benefitted from the existence of Horsin’ Around, of which there were surely a large amount. It makes it a little easier to cope with the guilt that comes from remembering any of his interactions with Sarah Lynn before, well … ever.
Herb raised an eyebrow, frowning. “I do not remember giving you a hickey on your forehead.”
“Ah, you got me,” said BoJack hurriedly, moving his hair to cover a bruise that was clearly not caused by teeth. “I bit myself.”
“That doesn’t -- holy shit.” His eyes widened. “Um, Sarah Lynn?”
Sarah Lynn froze like a deer in the headlights. Her arms were stiff at her sides for several long, painful moments. Finally, she turned to face Herb, a lopsided grin on her face, and murmured, “Yeah?”
Herb gulped. “...What happened to your arms?” he asked, cautiously, seeming to know instinctively that he wouldn’t like the answer. “In 1996, which is the year that it currently is?”
Sarah Lynn gulped. “...I fell?”
“Fell onto what?” asks BoJack, raising an eyebrow.
“My arms. Duh.” She forced a laugh at her own joke. Herb narrowed his eyes.
“Sarah Lynn,” said BoJack, very carefully. “You’re not … doing that on purpose, are you?”
“Pfft, as if,” she attempted, waving her arm dismissively, but they were still looking at her with skepticism. “Why would I do that? That would be, like, such a typical teenage girl thing. And I’m not even technically a teenager yet!”
“Exactly,” says Herb. “which is why it’s so concerning that you’ve already started doing this sort of unhealthy stuff. Sarah Lynn, I’m here for you.”
Sarah Lynn outright scoffed at that. “Why would you be here for me?”
“Uhhh…” Herb clearly wasn’t sure how to even begin to respond to that. He opened and closed his mouth uselessly for longer than he had any right to, like a confused fish, and then gestured vaguely with a grimace. “Because I care about you?”
“Yeah, whatever.” She turned away from them both, crossing her arms. “You don’t care about me. You just want to cover your own asses by being able to say you tried to help me.”
Herb frowned. “Don’t say ass.”
“Yeah, sure,” she deadpanned, starting to walk away from them. “That’s how I’m growing up too fast.”
He walks faster on his way back, out of some sudden paranoia that he might miss the train from taking too long. It’s a five minute walk there and back, and there’s no way it takes a full five minutes to grab a grand total of two things, plus a comically large amount of alcohol and cigarettes, but he’s still anxious. So, he checks the time on his phone damn near obsessively, even though every time he opens the damn thing he’s bombarded by notifications from Herb. When he clears all the notifications, he finds that his lock screen has been changed to a picture of Rick Astley. “God dammit.”
He’s pretty sure he’ll make it back to the station with a good two or three minutes to spare, but his mind still runs wild. For a moment he panics at the thought that Sarah Lynn might just leave him, if the train arrives before he does, and he’s downright terrified when he realises that might result in Sarah Lynn and his sister shit-talking him together, but then he remembers that there’s little to no evidence to suggest that Sarah Lynn is competent enough to catch a train unassisted when she’s sober, let alone now.
He remembers all too well when he could block out all the anxiety through a concerningly large amount of alcohol, but somewhere along the line drugs became like a molotov cocktail -- any time he had a problem and he threw alcohol at it, he almost immediately had a different problem. Then again, at this point most solutions work like that, and it’s all turned into a game of trading out problems for different ones, a never-ending juggling act of throwing problems back up just before they come crashing down around him, but he can never get rid of them, not without letting them fall to pieces first.
He’s used to the constant juggling, though. It’s been like this for as long as he can remember.
He flinched instinctively. By this point it was hard for her to do much of anything without prompting some sort of trauma-based reaction. She raised her voice, and he blindly bolted either to her or away from her; she whispered and his blood would run cold; if she moved her hands too fast he was guaranteed to flinch, badly.
This time, it was because she was talking quietly. It was something of a tradition for her to talk quietly, with a sort of tranquil rage, in the period after abusing him, when it had been long enough for her to start apologising. “Apologising”, in this context, referred to a long rant that started with “I’m sorry for yelling, but…” and ended with another long lecture about how BoJack was a complete asshole, a failure of a person who was nothing but a burden to her.
These “apologies” always circled back into the idea that she had nothing to apologise for, and the brief “sorry” they started with was always just a generic apology for being angry rather than a specific apology for any of the things she did while angry, which would then segue into a rant about how of course she’s angry and it was his fault, but young BoJack was always desperate to hear it, for some reassurance that he was still -- that he was still acknowledged even if he would never be loved, for proof that the yelling phase was over and it was now back to the perpetual calm before the storm that he lived in when neither of his parents were actively trying to make sure he died by either their hand or his own.
Beatrice sighed. Even though neither acknowledged it, it was clear that she had noticed his flinch, which she saw as nothing but a sign of weakness at best, and a deliberate ploy to manipulate her into thinking she had hurt him at worst. She breathed out a long exhale of cigarette smoke. “I’m sorry I was upset,” she said unapologetically. “In 1974, which is the current year.”
BoJack let out a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding.
“But,” Beatrice continued, making him gulp. “You really should have known better. I mean, you really thought it would be okay to be ten minutes late for curfew? I’m under so much stress already without you letting me think you’re dead just to manipulate me.”
BoJack blinked. He didn’t bother arguing. “I’m sorry, mom.”
She glared. “You should watch your tone with me.”
He couldn’t figure out what was wrong with his tone and he didn’t bother to ask. Instead, he stood there meekly as she exited the room. Once she was gone, he took a deep breath, and slammed his fist into the left side of his own head.
It hurt. Badly. It was because of that pain that he knew he had to keep going -- this was what he had been taught, that his sheltered and war-free life had made him weak , that the pain was the only way he would ever learn. She would be so proud if she knew, if she understood, that he had taken the initiative to punish himself instead of making it her job like everything else.
Not to mention that by this point, BoJack had learned the unmoving belief that he deserved it -- that he deserved everything, and worse, and that there was no punishment in the world that could possibly match his evil.
BoJack’s entire lift at this point was just a never-ending shitfest, where in order to stay alive he had to depend on people whose lives he was ruining. He was a burden to his parents, his teachers, and his classmates, and he knew that like he knew basic arithmetic, but he didn’t know how to stop, and his parents had made it perfectly clear that it was morally unacceptable to rest for a second until he’d figured it out.
At least this way, he could rest easy. He could sleep at night, with a pounding headache and a series of bruises on his arms that weren’t even from his father, resting easy in the knowledge that he hurt himself more than he hurt anybody else. This was his sacrifice to make, after all.
Despite his earlier anxiety, he’s walking slowly on his way back. Even his own fear can’t force him to muster up the energy to walk faster. He feels completely drained, physically and mentally, just from the strain of existing, and he doesn’t want to do it anymore.
As he forces his living corpse to shamble along, his mind can’t help but drift toward the piece of glass, the piece of probably still sterile glass, in Sarah Lynn’s pocket. Of course, it doesn’t take him long to remember that she’s already used it, and they have no way to wash it properly, and sharing blades is probably a bad idea, especially since if anyone has an STD or several, it’s Sarah Lynn. But, the thing is, part of him doesn’t even care.
In fact, part of him almost wants it -- wants to get AIDS from Sarah Lynn’s blood, wants to limp around on a leg swollen and leaking pus from an infection. He wants to punish himself, as badly as he possibly can, for the crime of existing, as BoJack Horseman.
He’s never cut himself before -- nothing quite so overt. Self-harm was such a damn near stereotypical depression thing that even thinking about it too hard would have forced him to admit he had a problem or several; at least when his preferred unhealthy coping method was an excessive amount of alcohol and cigarettes, it made him seem more like an asshole than a person in need of help. By the time his stupid-ass therapist had forced him to accept that hitting himself was self-harm, and so was potentially a lot of the rest of the stupid bullshit he did on a daily basis, she was also forcing him to stop, and that rather ruled out any idea of cutting.
But, BoJack isn’t listening to his therapist anymore.
When he sees her curled up on the bench, he wonders what to say. He wonders if he should say anything at all. If he asked for the blade, would she give it to her? Would she trust him not to throw it far out of her reach the second he had a chance to stop her from hurting herself? Heck, would he throw it far out of reach, after giving it a try himself, or would he hide it in plain sight, so that he could punish himself for daring to be while she was free from the burden?
But, he knows he won’t dare to ask. He doesn’t deserve to be free of pain, but he doesn’t deserve cutting, either. Even that little second of relief, the satisfaction of watching the blood stain his fur -- that would be too good for him. He deserves worse.
So, he takes a deep breath, and silently sits down next to her.
She stirs at the movement, and sits up, frowning. “Did you get my donut?”
“...God damn it.”