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Charlie can’t sleep.
It’s been hours since he nestled down underneath the sheets of his bed. He and Nick had finally called it quits on their Mario Kart tournament after realizing how late it had gotten. They did spend another significant amount of time kissing, hugging and generally being wrapped up in each other before finally resolving to go to bed. They did have school in the morning, after all, and getting to sleep at one in the morning was already going to leave them feeling less than refreshed.
Nick’s breathing is slow and even from where he lies on the mattress next to Charlie’s bed. He’s too respectful of Charlie’s parents’ rules to actually sleep in Charlie’s bed, despite Charlie’s ample protesting. Charlie understands, and he loves Nick for it. He loves Nick for a lot of things. He thinks there might not be a single part of Nick that he doesn’t love with every fiber of his being.
Charlie watches Nick’s chest rise and fall, listens to his breaths and tries to match his own to them. His heart is beating faster than it should be.
It hurts that Nick is so far away. In reality, he’s lying less than a couple of feet from Charlie, but Charlie is cold. He feels Nick’s absence in his immediate vicinity like a punch to the stomach.
Charlie realizes, distantly, that he is shaking.
A voice in the back of his mind screams at Charlie to wake Nick up, because that is why he’s here after all. Or, at least, it’s why he started being allowed to sleep over. Because Charlie was in too many pieces to hold himself together on his own. He was there to make sure Charlie didn’t fracture himself any further.
Charlie can’t look at Nick anymore.
He squeezes his eyes shut and buries his face into the liminal space between his duvet and pillow, applying as much pressure to the sides of his head as possible as if to keep the thoughts from flying out. He’s thinking so hard it hurts .
He’s panicking.
It’s just that it never goes away. The pain never goes away. The thoughts never go away. The urges never go away. The voices telling him that he is worthless and alone and repulsive and pathetic never go away. They are his own, after all. Every voice takes his own shape.
He goes out of his body a bit when this happens. When his thoughts take over, when his consciousness goes on vacation and all he knows is the urge to self-destruct. He tries logic, he tries talking himself off of every ledge his body climbs onto without his permission. He can’t be enough for himself to hold onto.
He remembers nights before he met Nick, when he was still being bullied severely and was struggling in silence. Charlie would be up all night with his racing thoughts, hot tears streaming down his face until he choked on them. He would wrap his arms around himself and pretend it was someone else, someone who didn’t think he was disgusting and unloveable. He spent nights rocking back and forth and murmuring to himself it’s okay, you’re okay, you’re safe, you’re gonna be okay .
Those nights were some of the loneliest of his life. Despite that, Charlie finds himself missing them sometimes. The nights where he could struggle without it being disappointing to those around him. If he slips now, if he relapses, Nick would notice. Tori would notice. His friends would notice. His parents would find out, even if they didn’t notice by themselves. He would disappoint everyone.
He’s so, so tired of being a disappointment.
The skin of his hips and thighs burns with phantom pain. He wants it so bad. He wants to relapse so, so badly. He’s so fucking angry at himself for stopping for long enough that cutting again would be called a relapse. Every day he stares at the healed scars, runs his fingers along them and commits each one to memory. He knows where they are, so he knows when they fade.
They’ve faded a lot recently.
Tears spill from his eyes without his permission. God, he wants it so badly. He wants to go find one of the blades he had the foresight to hide particularly well, the ones he didn’t even have to lie about having because no one thought he would keep their existence a secret. He wants to watch his blood well up, wants to let it stain his clothes and coat his hands. He wants to add scars to his collection, wants to carve the words his mind is spewing at him into his legs and arms and relish in the reminder that the sting will bring for the next week.
Charlie can’t breathe.
He misses the pain, misses it so bad. He is so very aware of his body right now, of the way he is free of the scabs and flaky skin he had donned for so many years. He knows where his skin touches, where there is more fat than he wants there to be. He knows he looks fine, but the sensation is overwhelming. Nick tells Charlie every day that he is the most beautiful person he’s ever seen, and the worst part is that Charlie believes him.
He believes Nick when he says that Charlie is sunshine personified despite the storms constantly raging in his head. He believes Nick when he says that Charlie looks pretty in a new outfit, or even just in old, ratty sleep clothes. He believes Nick when he says that Charlie is a good person, that he is more than enough.
He believes Nick when he says that Charlie’s scars are beautiful, too, but he thinks that they might be coming from different places on that one.
Charlie feels like there is a ball of lead in his stomach and broken glass in his throat. He has to do something, he has to move , he can’t be here anymore. He needs to go do something about these urges piling in his brain.
He sits up.
Nick is still asleep.
It would be so easy.
Nick sleeps pretty deeply. Charlie could get up, tiptoe around him, make his way to the bathroom and do what he needs to do. He could be back in a few minutes, could make up an excuse if Nick happened to wake up and notice him gone. If he hid it well enough, cleaned up well and used some of the bandages he had stowed away, no one would know.
Charlie knows how to hide it. He knows how to act like it never happened, like pieces of him didn’t ooze out with the blood he spilled. Nick might know what to look for, but he won’t pry if Charlie acts well enough. And he won’t see, either. It’s not like they do . . . that stuff often anyways, so it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary not to do it until the cuts healed, and he has so many scars it wouldn’t be noticeable.
He could do this.
Just once. Just to satisfy the urge, to give him something to hold onto for a while. To get rid of some of this hurt.
Moonlight spills across his room, lighting it up just enough that Charlie can plan exactly how he’s going to leave the room. It’s a pretty straight shot to the door, which is cracked open because of his parents’ rules anyways.
Charlie presses the duvet to his face, takes a deep breath. Is he really doing this?
Of fucking course he’s doing this. This is what he does. This is what he will always do.
A shudder wracks his body and he has to stifle a sob, throwing a panicked glance towards Nick. He’s still fast asleep, a peaceful expression on his face.
Charlie can’t stop fucking crying.
He needs to go now .
He slides out from underneath the covers as quietly as he can, biting down on his wrist to stifle the sounds threatening to spill out.
Charlie doesn’t want to do this.
He wants to stay clean, he wants to make Nick proud, he doesn’t want to hurt, he doesn’t want to keep it a secret, he doesn’t want to look at what he’s done, he doesn’t want to feel it every time he moves, he doesn’t want to he doesn’t want to he doesn’t want to .
He has to.
His feet hit the floor less gracefully than he’d like and he stumbles forwards, staggering towards the door. He’s going to break down, he just has to hold it together for a few more seconds, just has to hold it together until it won’t bother Nick when the pieces hit the ground.
Charlie’s foot connects with a pile of books, sending them toppling over and all across the floor. He freezes, biting down on his wrist hard . Nick’s going to wake up, Nick is going to catch him, Nick is going to be so disappointed .
Nick doesn’t stir.
Charlie almost sobs in relief and practically runs the rest of the way to the door. The hallway light has been left on, shining into his bedroom in a widening stripe as he opens the door to slip through it.
He steps out into the hallway, chest heaving. The hard part is done. He just needs to get the rest over with.
His skin is buzzing with some convoluted mixture of panic, excitement, and dread. The bathroom is only a few steps away, beckoning him forward like a siren calling him to drown.
He goes in.
Charlie can feel his mind slipping away, feel his body taking over. He pushes the door shut lazily and crouches down, pulling open the middle left drawer and feeling around until he finds what he’s looking for. This routine is second nature to him now. Bringing himself to destruction is as easy as riding a bike.
The blade slips out from where it was hidden with little resistance. Charlie is not himself anymore. He’s going to do this and then he will be Charlie again and he will go back to bed and he will pretend that this never happened. He is Charlie but he is not the one that is loved, the one that has a reason not to do this. He can’t be that Charlie right now.
He busies himself with wiping off the blade, making sure he has bandages and toilet paper, deciding exactly where he’s going to do it. He is so outside of himself that he doesn’t hear shuffling coming from the direction of his bedroom, doesn’t hear soft, familiar footsteps coming closer.
He doesn’t realize that he didn’t close the door all the way until it hits him in the hip, a shadow casting itself across his legs.
Nick.
Fuck .
He’s frozen, cool tile underneath his legs reminding him horribly of where he is and what he came here to do. Of what Nick is seeing. Charlie can’t look at him.
Nick has never seen this before.
“ Charlie ,” Nick chokes out, sounding more broken up than Charlie has ever heard him.” Charlie, love . . .” he trails off, and then he’s bending down and taking the blade from between Charlie’s fingertips gingerly, placing it out of sight, and he’s wrapping his arms around Charlie and pulling him to his chest and Charlie is sobbing .
He can’t breathe from how hard he’s crying, can’t hear anything or see anything or recognize anything around him. He’s unraveling and unraveling and unraveling and there’s nothing left in him to hold on to, he is so bare and open and terrified and his pain is right there, right there and Charlie knows that Nick is seeing it. He knows that he can’t hide this, will never be able to play this down.
This is Charlie at his core, Charlie unguarded. This is the rawest he has ever been in front of someone.
Nick pulls Charlie into his lap and squeezes him tight. He’s whispering something into Charlie’s ear that Charlie can’t understand through his blinding panic, rubbing circles on Charlie’s back in the way that he knows will calm him down. Charlie grabs fistfuls of Nick’s shirt and pulls, buries his face in Nick’s neck and wishes he were gone.
The worst part of wishing for death nowadays is knowing that he no longer means it.
“Deep breaths, Char, you need to breathe. I’ll do it with you, alright love? Just try and breathe with me, I’m right here, I’ve got you,” Nick murmurs, voice steady despite how worried he must be. Charlie sobs harder at how gently he is being treated, as if he is someone deserving of softness.
Nick begins to take deep breaths, whispering words of encouragement and comfort between each one. Charlie finds it in himself to calm down enough to join after a few more excruciatingly long minutes, and when he finally takes a breath it is shaky enough to send him back into a panic.
Nick tangles a hand in Charlie’s hair and scratches gently at his scalp. “That’s it, Char. That’s so good, just keep breathing with me.”
Charlie nods frantically, shaking his fists frantically where they’re still tangled in the fabric of Nick’s shirt. He tries for another breath and it enters his lungs just a little bit easier than before.
They stay like that for a while. At some point Nick starts rocking them side to side, a movement that he knows they both find soothing. Stray tears slip down Charlie’s face, disappearing into Nick’s already-soaked shirt. Charlie tries to focus on imitating Nick’s breathing, on stifling the spikes of panic that keep threatening to pull him back under.
He’s so fucking tired.
He comes back to his body in pieces. He feels Nick’s thumb rubbing back and forth on the back of his neck, hears him murmuring soft words into his ear, feels how gross and wet his face feels. The light hurts his eyes when he tries to crack them open, shuddering breaths still wracking his body. The tile digs uncomfortably into his knees and he can imagine that Nick isn’t very comfortable either after sitting hunched over on the floor for god-only-knows how long.
Charlie feels like he’s been wrung out, but he steels himself and pulls back a bit, avoiding Nick’s eyes. He stares at Nick’s wet shoulder and tries not to hate himself for doing that, for needing help, for needing to be held together.
Nick moves, taking his hands from Charlie’s neck and waist to cup his face. “Hey, Char,” he says. “Can you look at me?”
Charlie drags his eyes up to meet Nick’s. Nick is the only person that eye contact usually doesn’t bother him with, but right now it hurts. Right now he knows Nick is seeing right through him, seeing exactly how shattered he allowed himself to become.
Nick smiles, a small little gesture where only half of his mouth turns up. His eyes are sad and affectionate, and Charlie realizes that he’s seeing right through Nick, too.
“Hi,” Charlie whispers, voice ruined.
“Hi, my love.” Nick strokes his thumbs across Charlie’s face, wiping away his tears. “Are you with me?”
Charlie nods, not trusting himself to speak any more. I’m sorry , he signs, using the bit of sign language they had learned for situations in which one of them couldn’t speak.
“Hey, hey, hey, none of that,” Nick chastises. “Don’t apologize, Char, never apologize for this. I am not angry with you. I am not disappointed, no matter what your head is telling you. I love you, you know? I love you so much.”
Fresh tears spill over and Charlie wipes them away hastily, fingers catching on Nick’s. Nick tangles them together, bringing their entwined hands to his mouth to kiss the back of Charlie’s palm.
He’s not disappointed.
Nick, the one person in the world that always knows what Charlie is thinking, understands immediately. “I am not disappointed,” he says again, placing a tender kiss on one of Charlie’s tear-stained cheeks. “I will never be disappointed with you.” He pauses, pulling back a bit to look Charlie directly in the eyes. “Am I right to think that I got here in time, or did you do anything we need to attend to?”
Charlie battles between feeling like a failure for his answer and feeling embarrassed that Nick has toeven ask that question.
“Didn’t do anything,” Charlie chokes out, needing to say it out loud for his own sake and Nick’s. Promise , he signs, and Nick relaxes underneath him.
Nick pulls Charlie in for a hug, burying his face in his hair. “I’m proud of you, Char. I’m so sorry you have to feel this pain, I know it’s hard. I know it’s so, so hard for you.”
The dam breaks again, silently this time. Charlie shakes as he cries, twisting Nick’s shirt between his fingers. He needed to hear that, needed it so badly he was breaking apart because of it. He remembers those nights alone, holding himself together, where he would create fantasies of someone doing it for him. He dreamed of someone holding him and telling him he was doing a good job, that he was strong despite the hurt.
Of course Nick would understand that.
Nick lets Charlie cry himself out, stroking his hair the whole time. He’s so patient, so caring, despite how tired and worried he must be. Charlie loves him, loves him so much. He pulls back once again and signs it, signs I love you emphatically because he needs Nick to know right now. He can’t handle Nick not knowing.
Nick smiles again. “I love you too, Char. So much I can’t contain it all.”
Charlie is hit with a wave of affection and exhaustion at the same time. He slumps and Nick wraps him in his arms.
“What do you say we go to bed?” he whispers, pressing a kiss to Charlie’s forehead. “I can help you wash your face and I’ll clean up, then we can go to sleep. Does that sound okay?”
Charlie nods sleepily, letting Nick use the muscles he’s built up for rugby to pick them both up off the ground. He sets Charlie on the counter and grabs a washcloth, wetting it with cool water and wringing it out before using it to wipe gently at Charlie’s face. The cold is soothing on Charlie’s heated skin. He leans into Nick’s touch.
Nick chuckles, sliding his free hand up to cup Charlie’s neck. “Almost done, love, I promise.”
Once Charlie’s face is free of tears Nick takes some moisturizer and massages it into Charlie’s skin. A completely unnecessary step, but one that Charlie loves him for anyways. Charlie closes his eyes while Nick gathers the things that Charlie had pulled out earlier, tries not to listen for the sound of the blade being picked up and moved to somewhere he won’t find it until Nick can dispose of it properly. They’ve never done this before, but Nick seems to know exactly how to handle the situation. Charlie has always either come to him before or after relapsing, but he’s never been found while doing it.
A few moments later Nick slides his arms around Charlie’s waist. “Let’s go to bed, yeah?” he says, already picking Charlie up. Charlie nods sleepily against Nick’s neck, letting himself be carried the few feet to his bedroom.
Charlie is deposited on the bed gently, and he whines when Nick moves away.
“Just getting some fresh clothes, Char. I’ll be back in a second.”
Charlie doesn’t have the energy to protest. He collapses back against the rumpled duvet, trying not to think about anything that has just happened besides how wonderful Nick has been. Nick tiptoes over to the door and shuts it all the way, rules be damned, before grabbing two shirts from the drawer in Charlie’s dresser that has become full of his own clothes.
He hands one to Charlie when he comes back. “Want me to turn around?” Nick asks, already pulling his own tear-stained shirt off to slip on the fresh one.
Charlie hesitates. He doesn’t want to be seen right now, but he’s too exhausted to do it himself.
Help me? he signs, hoping that Nick understands.
He does, because he’s Nick. He’s Charlie’s Nick.
“Arms up,” he says gently once he’s gotten his own shirt situated, and Charlie complies. Nick removes his shirt almost clinically and pulls the new one on quickly, a courtesy that Charlie is more grateful for than Nick will ever know.
Charlie nods towards the pillows on his bed, asking a silent question.
“Do you want me to sleep in the bed with you?” Nick asks, cupping Charlie’s face in his hands. Charlie nods. Nick smiles. “Alright. Let’s get in bed then.”
He turns out the light and pulls Charlie with him to the top of the bed, yanking the duvet over them both. He wastes no time in gathering Charlie in his arms, pulling him close to his chest.
Charlie is so much warmer now.
He can still feel the remnants of panic and despair, but the shaking is gone. His face is clean, he is surrounded by safety. Nick is here to hold him together.
He sighs into Nick’s chest, snuggling closer to him. Charlie will never get over how safe he feels here, in Nick’s arms. He didn’t even think he liked physical contact until he met Nick, and now it comforts him down to his bones.
Nick kisses the top of his head. “Go to sleep, love. We can talk in the morning if you want.”
The morning. Fuck , they have school, don’t they?
Nick, whom Charlie is beginning to suspect can actually read minds, draws back a bit and cups Charlie’s face in his hands. “Don’t worry about school. I already texted my mum, and I can talk to your parents for you if you need me to. If you want to go we can, but you deserve to rest, love. We can just stay here.”
Charlie sighs in relief. He places a kiss on the underside of Nick’s jaw, a silent thank you for everything he’s done tonight. He kisses Nick’s jaw, then his cheek, and then hovers over his lips. Nick nods, and their lips meet gently for a few mind-numbing seconds.
When they pull apart, Charlie is smiling a bit for the first time that night.
“Go to sleep, love,” Nick murmurs, smile evident in his voice as he rests his chin on top of Charlie’s head. “We’ll see each other in the morning. I’ll hold you together until then.”