Work Text:
You tell yourself it’s for his own comfort that you find yourself hovering around his room. V needs you to keep him calm, help him recover, and keep him away from his phone and Rika’s lies. You hope he needs you, at least.
‘You should take your mind off things,’ you say. You’re nervous but trying your best to hide it. This is the first time you’ve been alone with V since Vanderwood had finished helping him through the first round of detox. Your mouth is dry in anticipation, hoping against all reason that he feels the tension as well.
V’s eyes turn around, weakly trying to focus on you. He can’t move much, says it makes him nauseous, but his mind is a bit more alert now that he’s thrown up some of the drugs. There is a small spark of awareness that wasn’t there before in the depths of his eyes and it makes your heart beat against your sternum like a caged animal. ‘He is beautiful’, you think, ‘and hurt. I can make him better.’ You are in love and it has made you foolish. All you can think about is the outside world, all the things you could do together, the warmth of the sun on your skin and the weight of his hand against your palm.
‘I’m sorry, I’ve let you down,’ he says. You are disappointed this is his opener, of course, but not surprised.
‘You haven’t. You were brave, and you were there for me when I needed you,’ you say, reaching for his forehead with a damp cloth. He is feverish, a blazing supernova underneath your touch, and you hope he is burning the hurt parts of himself away, hope that he will be renewed with your care. ‘Trust me on this one, it won’t help anyone if you keep thinking about you could have done better. You should keep yourself busy until you’re feeling better and then we can all untangle this mess, okay?’
V doesn’t seem convinced, but he doesn’t have the energy to fight back. Just as well.
‘What should I do, then? I want to help, but I don’t know what to do.’
His voice had always been soft and yet V breaks your heart a million times over with how frail he sounds in this moment. There’s a desperate edge to his words, as if he is trying to grasp at something that is just out of reach.
‘Well,’ you start, ‘we could just talk for now, keep you alert to see if the drugs are affecting your mental state. How about you tell me a story?’ You’re not sure if he can fulfill that request, but it can’t hurt to ask.
V’s breath is a shallow thing struggling to escape his chest. He considers your words for a bit before nodding slowly.
‘Okay. I think we’ve talked about this before, but have you read The Little Mermaid?’
You are back in his room with fresh towels. He has soaked through most of his clothes and bed sheets and yet his fever still refuses to go down. You are terrified for his life and it has made you sharp and dangerous. Your nerves feel like tight wound springs and you’re afraid that something inside of you might snap at the slightest provocation.
V looks worse than when you had left him. He’d been slipping in and out of consciousness for the last couple of hours, and the latest retching had left him looking porous, almost like he was not all there. You feel like you could push your hand out and pluck stray thoughts right out of his head. He had at least looked at peace when he was sleeping, too spent to even dream, but wakefulness had lent him a pained hesitance to his every movement.
‘Hey, V,’ you say, trying to sound calm despite yourself. ‘How are you holding up?’
‘Thirsty…’
You help him up and hold the glass to his mouth. It takes him a while, but he manages to gulp down a quarter of the cold water and you stop him gently before he strains his irritated stomach even more.
‘I’ll give you some more, but first we have to make sure you won’t throw up again.’
He grunts in response and slides down into the dirty sheets, exhausted from the effort of keeping his own weight afloat. You want to say something to make him feel better, but don’t know where to start. Whatever conversations you'd managed to hold over chat rooms have felt unproductive at best and like regressing at worst.
‘Hey, tell me a story,’ you say eventually. You hope he can’t feel the frantic overtones in your voice. ‘What about your travels? Something interesting you want to talk about?’
The silence stretches just a bit over comfortable, inches its way into an anxious wail inside your head.
‘Once, I saw a sun that never sets,’ he starts, and you instantly feel something glide between the two of you, something that bends whatever furtive confessions you had coaxed out of him into monstrous shapes. The sun, it’s always the sun. He’ll never stop thinking about it, not even here. You’d thought the isolation would do him good, that being away from Rika was all he needed to get better. You want to scream at him to get him to understand, but instead you sit up straighter in the chair next to his bed and try to focus through the red haze spreading across your vision. Your jaw clenches hard and you’re dimly aware of the taste of blood. You feel small and hateful. You feel self-hatred wash over you in a wave of bile. This is wrong. You’re wrong to feel this way. V is sick. V is hurt. V is dying. V is sitting there, in front of you, but he is not looking at you and this makes you a n g r y.
You let him finish his story. He is out like a candle by the end of it. You leave the room quietly, which is a surprise. You feel like you have gained twice your weight in worry and were afraid the floor would creak under the pressure. It doesn’t. You are a shadow in his space and a shadow in his heart.
About an hour later, Rika enters the chatroom, and you see red again.
The chat rooms have been weighing on your mind. It’s been a lot easier to keep your cool when you’re in the same room with V. The act of having him there, seeing the dent he makes in the mattress or how his skin looks in the dim light of the bedside lamp, makes it harder to believe he could just get up and leave. You’ve been stalking the app, prowling for any hint of Rika so you can tell her to go away, and it’s been unfortunately cutting into your sleep, making you wake up with a start in the middle of the night or from a nap just to check if there’s been any new messages. You think you’re being paranoid, but you can’t be sure. V must hate you by now, though. Your words are angrier and you sound desperate even to your own ears.
You can’t help feeling like the stress of dealing with Rika has been eating away at whatever confidence you had. Even before the cabin, back when you had been a valued guest at Mint Eye, standing too long around her had made you feel woefully inadequate. The more she talked about her darkness, the more confused you became, because the woman had a way of burning away any defenses people had and exposing the raw nerve underneath. Rika wasn’t dark, she was a raging forest fire who would maim someone before she’d allow herself to be put out. You were afraid of what she had uncovered lodged the bedrock of your insecurities.
‘You’re like me, aren’t you,’ she had told you, and it was and wasn’t true. In a sick, broken way, you found yourself admiring the way she could draw people to her like that, how she could soothe your wounds or open new ones with such an erratic pattern it made you want to stick around to find out which one she’d chose next. You admired and feared her. You would become snippy and angry in the chat rooms to protect what little you had left yet acting like that made you feel pathetic and scummy. And the more scummy and pathetic you felt, the more you wanted to keep V near you, the more reassurances you needed, the more pathetic you became. The inescapable finality of that cycle has you sobbing quietly whenever you can trust yourself to be alone for more than five minutes.
He says his love ruins everything, calls it destructive, blames himself, but you need what he has to give so much you can’t bear to leave his room. Between your hallowed terror and V’s retreating back, you felt lost. How can his love be bad if his attention is the only thing that can make you feel like you’re allowed to exist? You don’t know how you’ll live if he walks away from you now, but you also can’t imagine he could feel anything other than pity for the sad person you’ve become in the span of two days. You need to be strong. You need to show him you can survive in the harsh glare of his love, that your skull won’t crack open and leak all your horrible thoughts in front of him every time he graces you with a look.
‘Tell me a story, V,’ you coo. You can feel the strain in your vocal chords as you try not to relay the panic inside.
He picks another fairy tale. It’s about a girl who was born from an egg. As he speaks, you think about the midnight sun, a sun eternally circling around a fixed point. An endless summer. You think you’d quite like to see one before you die.
V wants to go to her. The thought bounces against the top of your head like it’s trying to escape into space and suffocate. You want to let it happen, want to empty yourself out with your nails. This hurts too much, and it might be better to not feel anything at all.
He is watching you carefully, seemingly catching on to your distress. V’s hand is on yours within seconds, making tentative soothing motions across your knuckles. It feels warm and slightly leathery from dehydration. You want to cry and then feel ashamed at that thought. You don’t deserve to cry, you don’t deserve this kindness and you definitely don’t deserve V. You’re not good enough to help him through this, you can’t be, or else he wouldn’t be saying those awful words to you. Rika had hurt him and everyone else around him and left the ground salted and barren wherever she walked, and yet here he was, willing to let her do as she pleased one last time.
‘Are you okay?’ His voice is cautious, unsure. It chafes against your anxieties like sandpaper. Little hurts that had been building up over the past days burst open and you lock eyes with him with a crisp smile. The green is a little muted, but his eyes are focused and calm. He seems more alert than you’d seen him so far and knowing that he is not delirious when he says he’ll leave pushes small pinpricks of fear behind your eyes.
‘Yes, V,’ you say as softly as you dare. You can’t show him this, you’d made enough of a spectacle in the chat room. V, and the name sounds sharp against your palate. It clefts the air in two with a barely contained violence. It’s a fake name and that thought stings. ‘Just a little stressed out.’
You need to be better than her, you need to know him as she didn’t. You need a different name for the growing shadow in your chest. You want to carve him open and hunt for something she hasn’t tainted with her claws. Your chest burns painfully with a need to understand. ‘Could you tell me another story? It really helps calm me down and I think it does you some good as well.’ You smile at that, but it feels wrong on your face. It has more teeth than you’d like, something hungry and predatory that scares you. ‘Maybe another one from your travels?’
Thankfully, he doesn’t question it too much, eager to help in any small way he can. He is a lovable fool, a complete wreck who will ruin himself before he sees anyone else suffer, and you need to save him from himself.
‘Sure. Would you like to hear about the time I went diving?’
‘Yes, please,’ and this is honest, at least.
His voice is less grating this time around, exposes less of your vulnerable flesh to the world. He tells you about the hotel he stayed at, the food he ate, the clothes his guide wore. For someone so philosophical, V’s stories can get surprisingly tactile. You feel overwhelmed by the need to share street food with him and buy pretty trinkets that you’ll never use from stalls on street corners you can’t pronounce, by the vision of what you could be together.
You phase out for a bit, lost in that contemplation, and by the time you come back into yourself he is getting closer to the end, talking about the actual dive. He goes quiet for a moment. His nails are trying to pull at the threads in his bed sheets with an absent-minded conviction.
‘I got lost at one point, you know. It was dark in that part of the sea. I could only see a small patch of brightness above, where the sun was directly hitting the surface. I couldn’t hear anything, and I couldn’t see anything other than that patch of white. I thought this is what it might feel like to die.’ V’s eyes snap to yours with a panicked look. ‘Oh no, I was supposed to cheer you up! I didn’t mean it in a bad way. I guess I…I felt at peace then, it’s why I thought of it now. It’s a good memory, I really hope you can understand.’
You think you do. You think about the world of darkness at the bottom of the ocean and how it makes life so desperate for light it rushes into the jaws of death at the merest hint of a spark. You think of how the pressure crushes everything, think of how those that survive lose their shape when they get back to the surface. You think of Rika and her open arms. Rika and her closed fist. You think of that diver at the bottom of the sea, looking up into the light, not knowing if it’s a lure or not. You think of the diver, lost in a world so dark the smallest kindness feels like an inferno.
You smile your toothy smile again.
‘Of course I do.’
You make beautiful art together.