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Everything hurts. Torn muscles scream when he doesn't even move, nerves that have been ripped apart like so much fabric send terror into his mind so that it's all he can do not to drown in it. Breathing hurts, so he tries to stop, but every time he wakes it begins afresh. No matter the bed, no matter the hands, his body knows it's broken and dying and he tries to accept it, tries to understand, and fails.
He had thought he could face death with more courage. Despite the knives and needles and jagged cuts of his pain, he thinks death is terrifying.
One time wakefulness stays, and though time has no measurement for pain, he lies in Achilles's bed and counts. Breathing still hurts and there seems to be no part of him that hadn't been connected to the absence in his abdomen, but if he concentrates he can almost sense a minute, almost feel it parallell to his pain, counting off seconds with breaths and aches.
And then familiar faces and strange, quiet voices tell him all is fine. As if reality obeys words, as if history lives and breathes with his life and the world cares if he dies. Regardless of his will, his living mind summons demons to churn inside his head. They eat away at his strength and they tear his resolve into tiny pieces of reason too jumbled now to ever make sense of.
It's not the first time he wishes Achilles would come limping in - accusingly, always - to tell him he is a fool and show him again how feet work, how to grip a thought as he only knows to grip a knife. It's not the first time, but it's perhaps the most fervent, when Diana has left and Lyle has arrived and so carefully closed the door almost all the way so as not to disturb him. He does not revel in the red hot itch and screech of skin trying to repair itself because he cannot feel he deserves it for trying to live.
The world is white when he takes his first step, and Morris and Myriam dress him in layers of fabric so thick he can hardly feel it's winter when he is at last positioned in Achilles's favourite chair on the porch. Their happiness is as invigorating as the icy air, but a curse when he cannot make himself walk far enough, never independently enough.
Still their kindness seems undeserved. Maybe he is weak to lean on it, but he finds no joy in sending them away.
In the world of white and the biting breeze, he longs for something to occupy him. To have a cause not tainted by anger, to be fueled by something other than blind hate. To someday close his eyes and see anything other than Charles Lee's eyes, whether dying or mocking.
He promises himself then that he will not let this change him. He will not let what has happened define him: he is more than the man who wielded the knife. Perhaps this is true. Perhaps it is only what he needs to tell himself in order to believe that he can be more. I will not caress your cheek and tell you I was wrong.
That had never been an option and so, nothing is lost. But it had not been his thought and perhaps, if his father could imagine that world, then maybe he could live in it.