Work Text:
Freddie never really planned his outbursts. He liked to pretend he did, he wanted people to think he was in control. But he had always tried to let the games run smoothly, at least at first. After years of building a reputation for public explosions, you do start to lean into that. He thought: if this is what I am going to be then there must be no point in trying to stop it. If I have to be the antagonist then I guess I will be. I guess that's just who I am.
But at the beginning, he never wanted to be like this. He just was the perfect awful cocktail of afraid of being wrong and nowhere to put his emotions. The perfect set of problems in a stressful environment to send him spinning downwards. This was how he ended up hiding near the back of a small restaurant, tears barely wetting his cheeks. Crying was an art that he had never learned. That was good. It meant that his makeup wouldn’t get as messed up.
He had been shaking, when the arbiter had taken him aside to firmly, but kindly talk to him about what had just happened, why there were chess pieces on the floor, why he had stood there yelling a panicked apology as the world seemed to close in around him and the people watching shifted awkwardly, right outside of his vision. He couldn’t really remember it. He didn’t feel like he was in his body at the time. He never felt like he could control himself.
He wanted them to lift his body out of the river. It was so close, so alluring. He was scared by how easy it was to touch. He could remember the last time he had tried. He had a hard time talking about these kinds of things. Like the sun, he couldn’t look at it directly. He couldn’t tell anyone about it, then, if he couldn’t tell himself about it. He stared down at the table, watching spirals of pulsing colour swirl in his vision. Waves of green and purple and red vibrating through the air. He could feel the ground moving under his feet like the rocking of a boat. He didn’t know why he was like this. It felt like the world was ending.
He hadn’t talked to Florence afterwards. He hadn’t looked her in the eyes. He had run away to hide and she knew better than to try to find him. He didn’t know when he would be able to leave the restaurant. He didn’t know what he would say to her when he got back. He didn’t know what his future held. He surely had ruined it all more and more with every falling apart, every game brought to a dramatic and painful halt. He didn’t understand how the arbiter had been so kind to him. He knew that he didn’t deserve that.
He was going to live. He was going to live because he hadn’t died yet, because he knew now to grab on tight and let the storm roll over him. He knew how to hover just on the edge of collapse. He knew how to sign autographs and stand in the light and he knew how to make people care about him. He knew how to hide and he knew how to ride out the sky falling down. Just barely. He was in a constant state of turbulence. He felt like a slowly burning fuse. He wished he could rest. He wished he could do anything to make this all stop. He would do a lot of almost-crying in the next week.