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It’s comforting.
The blade is sharp, stingingly cold in his hand. Metal scrapes over his nails as he turns it over, feeling the underside with the tip of his finger. His mouth is watering, foot tapping the carpet anxiously. It is a bitter excitement that coils in his gut, oozing, burning hot like tears. Anticipation makes him wary; he hasn’t done this in a while, not in a long while ever since Annabeth asked him to stop and Nico had asked him what the scars were from (he really must be doing it for the attention, if people so often asked). The mattress creaks as he sits down, already too used to this, probably.
He’s got no clothes on; something about him and the blades is intimate. Only they can see him like this, stripped down to carnal desires of violence, bare thighs and legs spread like a whore. His chest aches. He wants to cut it off, watch himself bleed out like a man.
Percy licked his lips, teeth scraping over his tongue. The sink is close; so close he can taste the dull, metallic tang of tap water. He’s always got the ocean. No one will know unless they realize there are scars that weren’t there before.
He hates his scars. They’re ugly, rough patches of rotten pink skin, jagged as they cut lightning bolts over his thighs and over his arms. But Annabeth will run her hands across them, feel the broken skin and she’ll tell him, “ I love you,” and he’ll be adding more by tonight, just to hear her say that (attention whore).
Gently, so gently, he dragged the blade across his thigh, watching as the skin broke and reacted. It always takes a moment with those little scratches, like his body is trying to process. But the blood bubbles up soon enough, in pinprick little dots that cling together into messy puddles of crimson. It glitters in the pale light from his bedside lamp, bright, bright red, he can almost taste it. He wished it did not taste like rust, because he would not mind filling a glass full and swallowing it down.
He does it again, giddy, trembling delight bubbling in his chest as the process repeats; pause, break, react, bubble. The bubbling is his favorite part, the way dots of red slowly become a massive puddle. He does it again and again until his bare thigh is covered in scratches. He gets bored and adds more to connect the lines until they become messy shapes; triangles, squares, anything with jagged corners.
Stupid bitch. You've made a mess.
Percy curled in on himself, tucking his thighs closer to him, digging the blade into a cut that still oozes. His nerves scream and shout, begging for release– he can see glimmers of red and violent pink flesh splitting apart under his practiced hand.
He doesn’t get upset when he does this. He keeps his mouth shut, muffling sobs because he knows that nobody wants to hear that shit, not even Annabeth. He shifted his leg a little, watching the blood slide down his skin. It might stain the bed sheets, and he’s afraid. Look at the mess you made, you little prick.
He wipes it away with his hand before it can touch the fabric, a smear of red split across his palm. He wrinkled his nose.
The pipes groan in the walls, and he twitched. He glanced up, narrowing his eyes. If they explode, someone will come in to see what his problem is, and they’ll stare and judge him because he’s one of those attention seekers.
He gets carried away, maybe. He blinks and both his thighs are boiling red, countless puddles of blood still filling out as it oozes from the skin. He licked his lips again, wondering, considering.
It burns.
It always burns. But he hasn’t done this in so long that it feels like agony, and without his wanting to, tears spring to his eyes faster than he can pull them back. He shuddered, body wracked with silent sobs as he kept himself silent, because he’s a good boy who knows how to be quiet when things get bad. He swiped his thumb over one, getting another smear of crimson over his skin.
He braced himself, counting to ten before he swiped the already-stained rag over fresh cuts, wiping up blood that was still flowing evenly. One, two, three…
He clenched his thighs together. He likes being alone like this, where he can practically taste the rot in his blood as he cuts his flesh open. He wonders if he can cut down to bone tonight. But then he remembers the last time he tried, and he remembers that empty room with nothing to do, and he forgets the idea.
Squirming a little, Percy tossed the rag away from him. He might be sick, he might cry and he might laugh. Blood stained his hand, blood stained his thighs. It’s comforting.
The skin of his arms is already ragged and scarred. He sets his blade down, only a moment, to brush his hand over the thick scar on his wrist. He can still remember how the blood had pooled from it, gurgling rushing from the wound as flesh split apart. He had passed out and woken up in the hospital, and his mom had looked at him like he was a stranger.
“I thought you stopped,” she said quietly, her voice on the verge of breaking. “You told me you quit.”
“I tried.”
Percy had cried then. He tried so hard to stop. But he never could forget how good he felt after, how it made him feel better. Even though he hated when it scarred and hated when it made a mess, he always did it anyway. He can’t quit.
He drags the tip of his blade over the scar, slicing thin lines into it. The skin throbs at the memory; Going again? It asks, and he has no reply. It’s violent, beautifully so, and he doesn’t care that it hurts so bad. Everything hurts. He’s making it better like this, he’ll see. He’s making himself better.
When Annabeth walks in, he’s already in the bathroom, holding his wrist under the tap. He’s still naked, he needs clothes because she can’t see him like this. But she probably does know what he’s been doing, because she always does. She knows him, she knows about it, and she knows he would rather die than stop. The door’s locked tight, she won’t be coming in, he won’t let her. And she knows that. He can hear a little thump, and he knows she’s sitting against the door, waiting for him to give up and come out. “Percy?”
“Mhm?” He hummed, not looking at the door.
“Are you okay?”
He’s taken aback by the question, because no, neither of them is remotely okay; not in a million years will either of them ever be okay. “Yeah. I just… just taking a bath.”
“Are you sure?” Her voice is a little muffled. She sounds disappointed.
“‘Course I’m sure.”
There’s silence on the other end for a long while, and by then he’s already got the bath running, thick clouds of steam rising into the air and fading. “... I love you, you know that?” She said, so quiet he can barely hear.
“I love you too.” Words he doesn’t say bubble as burning hot tears in his eyes. He can hear her get up, and he doesn’t know what she does next but he can assume she’s getting into bed. He hopes there aren’t any red stains on the sheets.
He sinks into the water. It burns, just a little, as the cuts close and mend. The scars will still be there, layered one after the other, and he can already see them, maybe pink, maybe white, maybe brown, maybe an ugly mix of all three. Tears still sting in his eyes, and he slumps into the water with a splash. It makes no difference, he breathes all the same, and for the first time in his life, he wishes he could drown. He doesn’t want to face the disappointment in Annabeth’s eyes and doesn’t want to wake up in the morning, he doesn’t want to have to hide his blades from her again, because she’s thrown them out too many times to count (he knows that she’s taken some, too. He’s seen her scars, too.)
In the morning, maybe he’ll do something nice for her. An apology. He felt bad for disappointing her. He’d been clean for so long and now he was back to square one, and he knew that she was frustrated and sad. He was sad, too. Disappointed, too. But it is euphoria to rip himself apart until he is nothing but blood and scars.
He falls asleep. It is tiring to bleed.