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It's 4 am and Ashton can't sleep. The insomnia is making the pain worse, and the pain is making the insomnia worse. They fantasize about someone clubbing them unconscious with a large rock. Maybe a nice little coma to get a little fucking sleep and just not fucking feel any of this shit for a while. What's a little more brain damage when their body is already so fucked up. How would they even tell the difference afterwards? Maybe Chetney will do it. He's the kind of guy who will do you a solid and fuck you up if you ask. He won't pull the punch, either. Of course, Fearne would probably steal his stuff while he's out. For safekeeping, surely.
But no, that's probably not a good idea. With his luck it would hit some nerve ending exactly right and give him a second chronic headache on top of the one he already has. Best not to push his luck. They say the soul exists in some god's realm after you die. Whoever would fight over the scraps of him. But the body dies. That's a comforting thought. To exist without this crystalline shell that hasn't felt right since puberty and has since only gotten more and more intolerable. His body which is the source of so much of his pain. He can barely imagine what it would feel like to just not feel. The euphoria of simply not being so fucking aware every hour of every day. A disembodied consciousness. He imagines the mental trauma would still be there, but it would be so much easier to fucking deal with without this intolerable background noise of badness.
When they tell people they're in pain they always ask stupid questions like “What hurts?” Because for them when they hurt there is a specific thing that wants their attention and is having a problem. And Ashton gives a stupid answer like "Everything” because no one wants a fucking novel about what specifically everything is, and they don't want to think about it long enough to specifically catalog it anyway. This is taken as cheeky and standoffish and they stop asking, which is good enough. It's not a topic of conversation they really want to engage with. Especially not with people who haven't run out of ways to describe how they hurt.
His system is overloaded tonight. The mortal body was not intended to have so many things going wrong at once. Nerves aren't supposed to be lit up like a festival. The pain is traveling and seeking out new nerves that aren't overloaded with feeling so they can shout at him “More! More! More!” His blood feels like acid. Like he's getting a corrosive chemical burn from the inside out. He wants to beg for it to stop, but there's no one who can or will stop it. The gods sure as shit don't care enough to intervene. At least if it was deliberate torture someone would want something and give some out to make it stop. But this is just sadism by biology. Torment for the sake of torment. Because fuck him apparently.
Their head hurts but hurt isn't the right word. It's not the sharp pain of their scars. It's just smothering pressure. Sometimes it swells into an ice pick stabbing them through the eye and right into the center of whatever the fuck is going on in the discotheque center of their brain. It feels like someone is holding their head so hard it dams up their veins and the blood presses against it relentlessly to get through. Harder and harder with an impossible amount of tension. It feels like their flesh can't hold it. Like something needs to burst. But it doesn't. It's simply relentless like a curse. A pervasive distress that something is wrong. That is honestly easier to deal with even though other people imagine it is worse and give more sympathy when they say it.
But no, what's really worse is the pain that isn't pain. The soft pressure. The feeling that is simply too much until it's so distressing that he wants to have a panic attack. He wants to string together every curse word he has ever heard in every language and invent a hundred new ones. But no one wants to deal with that, he doesn't want to deal with that, and so he's learned to be silent. It would do no good, anyway, because none of it would express even a tenth of the fucking discomfort. It feels more like an over-amped guitar from some fucking amateur who doesn't even know how to make that sound good. Like his brain cells are grinding together every time they hand off a signal. Every thought moves like it's in chest-deep mud while getting pummeled with Magic Missiles.
Like these thoughts. But they can't turn it off. They can never turn it off. The pain just dredges up more pain. It makes them flashback to all the pain they've ever felt, and they have felt a fuckton of pain. They're a trained connoisseur of discomfort, detecting all the subtle notes like a fucking wine snob. “Ah yes, this has notes of a twinge in the lower extremity with overtones of lower leg stabbing and mill stone. I'd say it's an 840 PD knee injury from juking into an alley too hard. A fine vintage.”
His shoulder twinges as if harmonizing. The tendons and muscles that never healed right. Maybe there wasn't enough left holding together to heal. He can feel the foreign object of the gold between his skin and muscles. Holding him apart and holding him together. Just a sensation now, but a sensation they can't get away from. He can never get away from the feeling of being shattered because he can feel every crack. Big wide ones, small narrow ones. It would be easier if they were all the same because at least it would be one less fucking piece of information vying for his attention. It would be easier if there were fewer. He's forgotten what none was like. That is simply theoretical now. He can feel it in his head and his shoulder where he took the hardest hits. It spider webs out across his skull and through his neck and across his bad eyes and down his torso spreading over his ribs and down to his hip and down his arm.
And and and. The pain is all and. None of it is singular. None of it can be experienced alone with periods. None of it is felt linearly. None of it is a single drip from an overhang. None of it is a light sprinkle. It's a roaring deluge all the time threatening to drown them on dry land. Soaking them in it until the fibers of their clothes chafe their skin and the cold seeps into their bones. The black clouds churn and the lightning blinds them and the thunder of it shakes them and threatens to blow out their ear drums with its boom. Each raindrop of some kind of pain bites into them like relentless claws. And they have nowhere to go. The alcohol feels like finding a discarded splintery pallet to huddle under. It doesn't do very much, but literally anything is better. And at least when they're stoned or raging they can stop caring. Just not caring helps so much. But it's not something they can just turn on any other way, and it has its own way of fucking them up. What they need is shelter, but all the doors and caves are closed to them. Sometimes it feels like life must be deliberately pushing them out of the safe spaces they can see. But those aren't for people like him. Like so many other things.
He rolls over. He'd like to keep rolling and rolling in a spiral like a crocodile taking down its prey. As if that would help. As if anything will help. But at least it's a different sensation. He's not as bored of this one yet. He will be in 5-10 minutes, but even a small change is better than trying to ignore it. He looks toward the campfire where his friends are keeping watch. There's some comfort in them being there. A comfort that scares him because it's only going to hurt more when they leave again. But he's not going to go there tonight. That's a whole other painful spiral they don't have the bandwidth for tonight. He's too fucking tired to anticipate pain that hasn't happened yet. He'll deal with that when it comes. It will, but probably not tonight.
Their view of the campfire doubles and blurs. Fearne and Laudna seated around it on watch become round blobs of color. Their fucked-up eye has decided to join the party. Another thing to process. They try to separate their vision into the good and the bad. The light cuts through them like another knife. Too bright in the darkness. Too much contrast. Too much flickering. More and more for those grinding neurons to communicate. It turns their stomach. One thing too much. They think about getting up and drinking until they puke because at least then they'd have a more understandable excuse than “I looked at a bright and welcoming thing.” Any numbness it could provide would be welcome. Anything to just destroy himself a little faster so he can stop feeling this bullshit.
He rolls over again and cradles his head in his hands, resting on the crook of his arm. He presses his palms into the crystalline spikes of his hair, feeling the sharpness cut into his hands. At least this pain he's in control of. He can make it hurt more. He can make it stop. He can make a choice. He doesn't have a choice about any of the rest of it and the difference is a relief. So much of the stress is just not having autonomy over any of it.
So much feels like it's been taken from them by all this pain. So many things they used to do with ease and now have to push through and suffer for. Sometimes it feels like the better memories from long ago are only there as a baseline so they can know just how bad things are now. Just so they remember that most people don't have to put up with this and they will never have to experience this. They've been singled out for this special hell. A club no one wants to belong to. Sometimes there's camaraderie in finding the ones that do.
The people that get him aren't like the abled pricks that define him only by the pain once they know. Who try to be so nice and understanding that they take away his autonomy even more. Who won't ask for his boundaries and don't accept them when he tells them anyway. Who act like they know what he really needs. Who won't let him decide when he wants to push through. At least the dickheads who act like he's faking it or being a wimp can be written off as asshole fuckoffs he can flip off and walk the fuck away from. Bell's Hells are getting better. They moved too gingerly at first, especially Orym, but they listen and they're getting better at what he needs. He's gone so long without being hugged because it hurt or nobody cared, it's a nice change. People assume he needs light hugs, but that just adds to that prickly acidic background noise. The hard hugs cut through it, he can really feel them as a new sensation, and they will end. He can choose if he's had enough. They have a definite end. They are an expression of someone giving a shit about them when so few people ever have. He is glad Orym has listened and learned to give good hugs for what he needs.
Their body had so often felt alien to them for so long. Even beyond the injuries and the nerves. Their early recollections of being an elf feel like having someone else's memories. They don't remember anything before watching their parents be torn apart in the Hishari disaster. They wonder what their body felt like before that. They remember the physical distress of the sun and thirst and dust of the desert, and their rough handling being sent to the orphanage. Those are still Elven memories. Puberty had hit them so much harder than any other kid around them. How were they even supposed to make sense of gendered changes when their flesh turned to stone and their hair turned to crystal and their insides turned to gods only know what? A body that scared them and that they were never meant to experience. Who the fuck wouldn't feel body dysmorphia going through that? How were they supposed to conform to any binary when this fucking shit had happened and obviously none of the rules applied to their situation? They are the Elf of their childhood and their earth genasi of the present, and that just feels more plural on its own. Maybe they're not even an earth genasi anymore. Maybe they're just an amorphous entity of pain.
Sometimes he imagines just being a ball of energy without a form and how freeing that would be. Just to float or glide or sparkle or whatever across the vast space of Exandria and beyond without being tethered to physical feelings. He rolls onto his back, squeezes his eyes tightly, and tries to focus on that. Trying to remember what Orym showed him about meditating before everything with Bor'Dor got fucked. Breath before fear and anxiety. He bends all his thoughts towards just imagining being that ball of light. Scanning through his body from his toes to his shoulders down his arms and then through his head. Taking note of all the sensations while detaching from them. Acknowledging them and then working to dismiss them. They try to claw their way back into his consciousness and he just imagines staring them down like a fucker in a bar trying to get into it with him over some stupid shit. Just be more imposing, more solid. Make it know that it can fucking move and get out of his way because he's not going to. Imagine imagine imagine what it would be like to feel something that's better than this. Something different and not just differently bad. It's like counting sheep but counting one pain after another as he throws them in the garbage.
And eventually, that imagination crosses over into dreams. It's not the most restful sleep they've ever gotten, but it's something. Just for a little while, they know a bit of peace.