Work Text:
Life was a flurry of colours, of reds, blues and yellows rushing past him and sinking into his skin, his pores and his very existence. He spent hours in front of the mirror in his bathroom in a shredded old tank top, his head bowed and sweat dripping from his brow and that well known scowl that basically made him famous on the internet. The King of Rage. His knuckles were worn and scarred from the abuse he put them through on the punching bag in his back shed but no matter how much he fucking destroyed that bag; it didn’t help soothe the itch beneath his skin, the constant reminder of who he used to be. He got the ink to cover the angry pink patches of skin beneath. He hated it; he hated those fucking marks that forever haunted his dreams, his nightmares. But they were a part of him and what him who he was. He was the angry kid with the reddish-brown hair from New Jersey. That’s all people thought of him when others said his name. “That Rage Quit dude, right?” But what fucking set that spark in him? What sent the forest up in flames? What created the inferno of carnage?
That, now that, was the only question he could answer.
He had started the fire and now he couldn’t get it to go the fuck out.
Wake up, stare at the ceiling for twenty minutes, drag yourself out of bed, chuck a piss and stand in front of the mirror. Those were the constant fixed rituals he went through each morning. Somehow, he always ended up in front of that mirror for hours. He had to wake himself as early as 3:30AM because of the fascination with the man in the mirror.
He remembered when he was just a kid. Shit was easy back then, you know? It was just him and some kids, sure he was always the short tempered tiny little terror, but parents and grandparents thought it was “charming” and “adorable” – until he hit you right in the shin with a squarely lined up kick from tiny sneakered feet. Then he was “disobedient” and “horrid”. He didn’t like being described as either of those things, he didn’t like being described. He was just him, he was just Michael Jones. He didn’t try and shape and mould himself in any way since the beginning of high school. That was the moment he threw his last fuck to the wind and let nature take its course. And it did. Nature kicked the shit out of him with harsh whispers from forked tongues of other students carried in the wind. He heard the laughter when he entered a room, or exited. He found himself looking up to find them staring at him and giving a smirk when he met their eyes – even for just a fucking brief moment. They were waiting. But surprisingly, they never hit him, not even once. Not when he threw a fit in class and tossed a chair clean across the class – narrowly missing the new kid – and not when he beat that kid to a near pulp and had to be dragged off him or else he would and could have killed him. Nobody ever threw a punch back at him.
When he started digging the razors into his legs, nobody knew. At first, they were nothing, baby scratches as he called them and they helped for a while. Then he found the box cutter and he pressed it hard into his leg until blood pooled around the blade and dripped down the edge of his thigh onto the carpeted floor of his room at his parents place. He stood for a few minutes, reveling in the woozy feeling floating around in his head until he noticed the smudge of blood on the floor. He rearranged his whole room, shoving the bed over the spot. His mother never knew.
And she still didn’t know when he purposely poured the boiled water over his forearm and choked back an agonized scream and the sigh of relief that came afterwards because everything, every tiny fucking thing, stopped.
The voices faded out as the demons inside his head took a step back in awe, and the constant heavy feeling in his gut like he swallowed a fishing tackle box full of sinkers lifted and he felt as light as a feather, that homesick depressed manic person was gone. Until he realized his fucking arm was burning.
When his mother rushed into the room to see what had happened and saw her son standing there clutching an empty kettle and the angry red skin on his arm, she didn’t know that he’d done it on purpose. She pulled him over to the sink and ran his arm under the cold water while she fetched her first aid kit. She was too busy with the burn to notice the whitened, paler skin that ran from the start of his wrist up his entire forearm in a vertical line. At this point, Michael just didn’t give a shit.
That brought him back to this moment. Looking up at himself in the mirror with sweat drenching him from his nightmares of losing what he loved and needed most. His scars still stood out to him though nobody else seemed to notice or comment on them. But he was painfully aware that he was so fucking tore up that he has to physically tear at himself to make it go away, and sure he didn’t do it anymore (though God knew there were days where it was all he could think about) but he was still the short tempered, depressed and manic person he was in high school.
Except there was one difference, one life altering thing.
And that one life altering thing walked into that bathroom, wrapped his arms around Michaels’ waist and rested his head on his boyfriends back and whispered “Good morning,” in that honey-tinted accent of his. And like those moments where he cut himself open, the monsters took a step back and watched in awe as Michael turned around to pull his boyfriend to him to kiss him gently.
“I love you,” The British boy smiled gently and pushed the dark curls from his boyfriends’ eyes.
“I know.”