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“Bring me home,” he whispers hoarsely, and Thatch places a kiss against his forehead.
Something hot drops on his cheeks, and then he can hear Thatch’s breath hitch.
“I’m sorry-,” Thatch says, stumbling over his words with a voice that cracks, and more tears - for Ace has realised that’s what they are - splatter onto his skin.
“Take me home,” he begs, trying to move his hands, trying to grab Thatch’s shirt, but he’s frozen, and Thatch stands over him, sobbing.
He cannot move.
He breathes his last; then breathes again.
His lungs feel like flames, like licks of living acid peeling away his insides with every breath, but he breathes nonetheless.
He isn’t dead.
(Take me home, he thinks when he sees bleached-white walls and the marines’ symbol embossed in a blue that hurts his eyes.
He wonders why he feels like he’s asked that before - begged for that before - and gotten no answer. He wonders what home is.)
He tries to speak, ask where he is and why he’s still alive (he shouldn’t be- why shouldn’t he be?), how he’s still alive, but his tongue doesn’t work. Ace wonders how he’s going to eat, and like a switch has been flipped suddenly all he can think about is how hungry he is. Dishes dance in his mind, and for a moment he thinks he’s started to drool: he tries to move his hand, but something holds it in place, wrist chafed to the point of pain, and Ace jolts.
“Oh,” says someone, curiously, and then sweet brown eyes and long lashes are in his face. The face they’re embedded in is soft and her smile is gentle. “He’s awake.”
What she does isn’t sweet.
(He isn’t dead. He didn’t die.
In the days that follow, he wishes he had.)
He learns to stop regretting the mark on his back. Forgets why it aches so much to see a mess of scar tissue and a lattice of half-attempted tattoos of in the same blue that stains the only walls he sees. Hates the fact that he can’t get rid of the ache in his chest when he does catch sight of himself in the mirror.
While he’s busy memorising every scar, a person appears in his reflection; he isn’t sure who it is, but it can’t be him. He knows his body, and the skeleton of skin and bone staring back at him is no living being.
(Then, he begins to wonder who the person he remembers is, because the jut of his hips and ribs underneath his hands prove his memories wrong.)
They take his picture, as days go by. Takes his picture with bloody, torn up wrists and how it heals and what he looks like as his body hollows out. He thinks he should- move. Should do things. But he’s always so tired that he can’t ever make the effort. His skin itches, but no amount of scratching gets rid of the sensation, and sweet brown eyes always furrow in disappointment when she sees the scratch marks.
Her name is Jolene. She brings him food that he chokes on, and muffles laughter when he does.
No-one else has been kinder than her.
She shows him the pictures too. Tuts over his body and sighs at the difference, and he winces and traces every outline of muscle he can see, wondering if he could look like that instead of as though he were about to break.
(In the photographs, you can’t see the lines of his bones, or how easily everything hangs off his frame, like he’s a coat hanger instead of a person. In the photographs, something gleams in his grey eyes, the edge of hard won defiance, the glitter of fire.
Fire hurts. It’s been applied so many times to his skin that he can’t ever equate it with anything else.
He wonders how much he used to hurt.)
He wants to be the sea.
Or at least throw himself to her mercy and pray for her to drag him to the depths forever.
(“Let me die,” he begs to the darkness in his dreams, but no-one ever answers. He has no kind faces to envision holding a knife, and he is still too close to life to be visited by the dead again.
He still grips life with white-knuckled hands, and hates the fact he can’t let go.)