Work Text:
There’s something sitting on your chest, heavy and unyielding. It sinks into your lungs and squeezes them with sharp biting claws and gnashing teeth. Every breath feels labored. Each inhale feels like you’re being shredded from the inside. Your lungs feel too small, like they’re fading away with each breath you take.
The bedroom is all but silent except for the ragged sobs that leave your body. Your eyes can’t focus on anything, staring unseeing at your dresser. Tears cloud your vision, and your throat tightens with each second that passes by.
You ache. And all you can do is endure it. Everything is too much all at once, and you’re so overwhelmed with emotions that you can’t name to do anything but clutch at your own body, trying to hold yourself together as you fall apart bit by bit. You feel shattered. You feel broken beyond recognition. You don’t even know where to begin to start piecing yourself back together.
Everything feels so far away, so out of reach even though you know it’s right there. The world around you is dulled. Colors bleed together and turn grey. The sounds of the city around you seem like they are filtered through a panel of glass, blunted and muted.
You don’t know how long you sit there, throat tight with disquiet and eyes stinging with hot tears that burn tracks down your face.
You don’t know how long you sit there.
Time passes, curling around you in a tight circle of endless anxiety and desperation.
Distantly, you hear your apartment door open. You continue to stare at your dresser, chest aching with heaving sobs and gasping breaths.
You don’t register that Fives is there until he’s kneeling in front of you, brows pinched and face creased with frantic worry.
“What’s wrong, mesh’la? Please tell me what’s wrong,” Fives all but begs.
Your eyes slowly move across his face, taking him in without actually seeing. Everything is too much and you don’t know what to do. You don’t even know how to tell Fives what’s wrong because right now it’s everything.
“Ev-every-th-thing,” you gasp out, sobs and gasps cracking through your voice.
“Alright, mesh’la. It’s going to be alright,” Fives begins in soothing tones. The soft fall of his voice washes over your nerves like a balm. “Is it alright if I touch you?”
You nod your head in answer, gasping a sigh of relief as Fives immediately wraps his arms around you, pulling you into his lap. He begins running his hands up and down your back in slow sweeps. The warmth of his hands sinks into your skin, and you relax further against his chest, burrowing your face into his neck.
“I’ve got you, mesh’la. It’s alright. I’m not going to let go,” he murmurs.
Slowly, you bring your hands up to grip at him, crushing him against you as your sobs slowly die into soft tears and hiccups.
“Just, just don’t go. Please.”
“Tell me to stay and I will be here for as long as you’ll have me,” Fives says as he presses a light kiss to your shoulders, continuing to rub soothing circles along your back.
“Stay,” you mumble.
“Always.”