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Sam watches in third person as The Warden sharpens his shears. The Warden turns to his temporary prisoner and says something but Sam cannot hear, he feels as though he is underwater, watching in terror. He can’t breathe. The Warden’s victim shouts something in indignation. He can’t move. He wants to look away because he knows how this ends, he knows how it always ends and although he’s seen it play out a million times it’s never with him. Never with him .
The Warden breaks through the glass and pins Tommy to the wall behind him, and begins to methodically sever the boy’s arm from his body.
Sam wakes up to the sound of his own scream, tears streaming down his face.
—
It's only fitting that Sam spends the entire morning of this particular anniversary emptying the contents of his stomach. Not that there was much there in the first place, but he’s no stranger to throwing up on an empty stomach.
(Sam heaved his guts out that night when he got home, he didn't have anything in his stomach then either.)
He couldn't recall most of the other things that happened that day but Sam remembers the act in vivid detail. He remembers his actions as if they are not his own, but he knows they're his own. He wouldn't see someone methodically slicing through flesh and tendons whenever he picks up a pair of shears if they werent. He hasn't cut his hair in a year. It gets in his eyes-
Eye. Just one. He’s still adjusting to the fact that one of them is artificial.
It gets in the eye that still has feeling in it and it gets tangled and he has to do something about it. He tried to last night, he did, but when he held the shears in his hand everything got far too loud and his head couldn't take it so he'd waited till the morning. He hadn't even realized what day it was till he woke up to his empty stomach churning.
His problem currently is, now that he's stood up and hunched over the sink, that he also vividly remembers seeing his reflection in the glass before shattering it.
No, not his reflection. It wasn't him. Whatever stared back at him was not his own reflection. It was a monster wearing his face.
It's been a full year since that day and he still can't bring himself to look. He's too afraid to look. He grips the sink and shuts his working eye tight because he's so fucking terrified of what he might see staring back at him.
(A white mask and a grin.
You are just like him .
You deserve to suffer and rot in that cell .)
He looks up like ripping off a bandaid and, just like last year, it takes a moment to register what he was looking at was himself. He looks blankly at the disheveled man staring back at him. An empty shell. The monster from a year ago left its vessel hollow.
The vessel in question had been crying. Tears dried on his face from the nightmare he woke up from. The acrid taste of bile still hasn’t left his mouth. (He knows he would never lay a hand on Tommy, but once he thought he could never hurt Ponk. That thought terrifies him. It makes him want to be sick all over again.)
The eye he had Sam Nook put into him (he could have done it himself but he still couldn’t look in the damn mirror) looks out of place, as if someone had just crammed it into his eye socket where it doesn’t belong. That sentiment wasn’t too far from the truth.
He needed to fix himself. He was broken and useless and now he’s all better and less vulnerable but, now that he could see it, it was like putting duct tape over a gaping wound. A laughable attempt.
Dream's scar runs diagonally across his face, a result of him turning away from the impact.
("You fucking idiot , you flinched ! Your scar isn’t gonna look like his now!" A kick to his ribcage. "And quit crying, you baby. You deserve this, stop feeling sorry for yourself. My god, even Tommy didn’t cry this much!")
His hair looks awful, it's too long and it pokes the eye that still has feeling in it. The once lush dark green looks so much duller now, like the color is being sapped from him, as if the prison sapped his green like the Egg had drank the red from Bad.
He does not look at the shears laying accusingly, mockingly, next to the sink.
( Coward, they whisper. You will fail, just like you always do .)
He picks them up.
The room drops a thousand degrees. His feet are glued to the stone floor beneath him as he looks at the reflection he barely recognizes as his own. The screams echo in his mind, but he ignores them. He’s gotten much better at ignoring screams in the past year.
Snip. ( SAMMY )
Snip. ( PLEASE IT HURTS )
Snip. ( MY ARM MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP )
On the last snip on his bangs he catches his finger on the blade with a shock of pain jolting through his hand. The weapon clatters to the floor but he doesn't hear it hit the ground, he's already miles away.
The feeling of resistance, of the blade sliding through his own flesh, makes the air feel thick with fog that fills the inside of his lungs, inside of his brain. His blood ( it’s Ponk's blood , it’s gotten all over his hands and it stains his very soul ) slowly leaks from his finger accusingly. He can hear it dripping onto the floor.
Drip. ( An arm drops to the floor, detached, with a thud )
Drip. ( Blood flows like a faucet. )
Drip. ( The Warden feels nothing. Sam wants to scream. )
He doesn't know how long he stood like that, frozen in place as he watched himself bleed. It felt like the whole year played out in that span of time when Fran licked his other hand and snapped him out of it.
He doesn't know how long he'd been holding his breath, either.
He gave her head a pat (his hands were shaking).
"Good girl," he whispers hoarsely
He cleaned his fresh cut, head still light and fuzzy (he has to remind himself the blood won't come off because it's coming out of him), and stopped the bleeding with some toilet paper.
He carefully cleaned up his mess and went to the kitchen for the first aid kit in the cabinet. The rest of his hair is still tangled and ugly and desperately needs trimming but it doesn't matter. He’s got enough out of his eyes so he can see better.
It’s fine. He’s fine.
(He bandages his sliced open finger. He bandages the stump that used to be Ponk’s arm.
He pretends that whatever he returns to is normalcy.)