Work Text:
tweek had been hunched in a ball to the side of his toilet, and sprawled out on the floor beside his bed all night long. the sun filtering through his blinds marked his third day without proper sleep.
why? he’s not entirely sure. and, he’s becoming acutely aware of the fact that might be a slight bit of an issue. he’s all talk up inside his brain; about how he’s so sure that he’s able to tough out twenty-four hours without sleep, no sweat.
and then that becomes two days.
and then, in some cases, he supposes, inevitably becomes three.
why is that physically possible? why don’t his eyes just force themselves shut? or why doesn’t his body just drop? make itself useful somehow? because, he sure as hell isn’t able to make it do it himself. he really hates his body. for a lot of reasons, actually, but it’s inability to function correctly at any times is a major one for sure.
it’s the weekend. on thursday, after missing that night of sleep, he anticipated the weekend to make up for it, go crash at craig’s house, smoke a little, down a few sleeping pills, and take a fat ass, fifteen hour nap.
these plans are, unfortunately, not going to be fulfilled.
because at the very asscrack of dawn, when he was still shivering and snotty from a very lengthy night of crying and puking all over himself for hours on end, his mom comes in and gives his crumpled figure a simple absentminded look over.
she gave a drawn-out hum. “what’s wrong?” there was no genuine concern behind it. tweek was only able to muster a sad, pathetic, little whimper in response. “i’ll give you some ibuprofen, then you have to hurry up. work.” she’s out of his bedroom door before he can even begin to try to say anything else. tweek had been hunched in a ball to the side of his toilet, and sprawled out on the floor beside his bed all night long. the sun filtering through his blinds marked his third day without proper sleep.
he cannot do this. he cannot do this. there’s something actually, legitimately wrong with him.
getting up was unreasonably difficult. his eyes are bleary as he presses both palms to his cold bedroom floor to provide enough leverage to stand up. figuring out how to maneuver his legs out from under his body and finding a way to properly extend them out is rather difficult. when he does, though, he’s stumbling up like a baby deer. he trips over the air , rolling out his ankle and making something akin to a grumble in pain. this isn’t okay.
there’s an awful tremble in his legs. his upper body feels as though it weighs four times as much as it does normally, shoulders sagging and fucking up his posture. his spine is aching. his knees are weakening from the effort of somewhat trying to bare his body up. he has to actually grip onto his bedframe to stay up. he breathes deep- once, twice, and then forces his feet into motion and trudges along.
a wave of dizziness hits his body, first, planting itself into his head, then, moving down to his stomach. the nausea is painful . he clutches himself in the middle, sputters a gasp, and swivels to his overflowing trashcan by his desk.
he’s not too sure what there is even to expel from his guts anymore. water? maybe? he hasn’t been able to eat properly in days , either. being on meds is pretty serious, man.
his chest heaved to get rid of the waves of bile. it hurts his ribs. there’s nothing he despises more physically nowadays like throwing up. it happens way too commonly.
following this, he’s forced to face himself in the mirror.
to his discovery; he looks like shit. an actual pile of shit.
his lips are cracked and his eyes are so bloodshot and glazed over. he looks like he’s high, dude. his skin looks like it’s been spread thin. the thinnest it can go. he is the color of his bones, he's pretty sure. his complexion is sickly sallow and pallid, cheekbones hollowed, and the only real color apparent in his face are the heavy smears of mauve indented beneath his eyes. his eyebags have never been so prominent in his life .
not to even begin thinking about his hair. it’s matted, all slick and damp to his forehead from sweating bullets all night long. he slaps a brush to his head in frustration, immediately followed by a pained wince.
he rinses his mouth out from the acidic taste of watery bile in his mouth, then, scrubbing his teeth and gums vigorously until they feel raw and swollen. his jaw is aching.
trying to make any attempt to make his appearance any better in the slightest with his shaking limbs is completely fruitless. it’s wasting his time, and his reflection is just pissing him off anyway. it’s like he’s taunting himself, or something, it’s the purest physical manifestation of exactly how he feels mentally. the accuracy scares him.
he’s just so mad . mad that he cannot, for the life of him, sleep. he just wants to sleep, so bad , man.
he pulls on a green knit sweater. it’s not as ‘professional’ in comparison to his collection of button-ups he’d usually sport to work. but, his hands are trembling too hard to fumble any sort of buttons. hell, he can barely zip up his jeans. he doesn’t know if he should be trusted to manage anything at all today.
his knees halfway buckle from each step he stomps down. his weight bouncing makes his head thunder. he’s so sluggish and sore and his limbs have each individually numbed with how much they’ve become to feel like lead. the banister is his only lifeline. thank fuck for the banisters.
his mom pops three little circular, reddish-brown pills into his clammy palm. she leaves it up to him to figure out what he’d swallow them down with. she and his dad are still all pissy that he quit coffee. his dad does make snarky little comments more often than she does, though, shit like; you’d feel much better with a cup of coffee, son. oh, right, you don’t drink it anymore. way too often, it has to be purposeful, he has no doubt that it is.
he sticks his head beneath the kitchen faucet and gulps down the lukewarm water and pills all in one go. not the best option he had available, but it was the lowest effort one.
slugging out of his front door, squishing his feet and half of his ankles into his atrocious work shoes, and letting his shoelaces and the bottoms of his jeans drag into the thick, stark-white blanket of snow covering the walkway. it’s far too bright out. he blinks dully around, squinting to adjust to the vibrancy levels surrounding him from the sky. the cold makes his throat sting. breath wheezing, he drags himself to his parent's car.
work is stupid. and it sucks.
by some graces, his parents begrudgingly stuck him in the back. they said he looks too deranged to be fronted to the public. gives the shop a bad image, blah blah, a whole load of shit, essentially.
despite that, he is somewhat grateful . he can’t really trust he’s socially capable enough right now to complete human interactions that fall generally onto the normal scale, either.
he’s nowhere near as appropriately dressed as he had thought, though. the metal insulated walls make it bone-chillingly freezing. originally, it had alleviated the sheen of sickness clinging to him. but then, it made it worse. much worse. his lungs got tight and his skin became stiff and numb. his body feels heavier the more it feels frozen.
it’s dim, too. the only things separating it from being a borderline prison is the line of fridges and freezers and shelves, and the window inside of the entrance door that shows a peek of light from the front.
the tasks are usually simple and he completes them with ease; sweeping and mopping, dusting, restocking, checking their supply, etcetera.
but the sleep deprivation is sort of debilitating him. he can’t stop walking like he’s got two left feet, or having to stop and clutch the iced-over walls to support his pitiful body. balancing feels all-around foreign of a concept to him. he’s shuffling, one leg supporting him stupidly at a time.
he had to force himself to listen to music, on the highest volume, so that it felt like it was just being fed directly into his brain and bloodstream. he’s got longview by green day on repeat. he likes the way it bounces around from his right ear to the left within his earbuds. because of that satisfaction, it produces, his brain is set a little more comfortably on overdrive hyper focus mode.
he wants to die. he wants to seriously just disappear into thin air. he had to hunch over, folding his body in half, and dropping to sit supported by his ankles for a solid few minutes. he shudders out a weak series of dry sobs that cause more of a hollow ache in his throat and chest. he doesn’t know if he should feel more angry or more sad for himself. or a mixture of both all at once. it’s too complicated to ponder on hard about.
after a lot of internal deliberation, he decides if continues to stop moving, eventually, he’ll not be able to start doing it again. he’s back to dragging around his feet and pulling the mop bucket languidly across the floor. it’s scraping the metal ground in an unpleasant manner that’s audibly clear enough it’s able to be heard even over tweek’s music. he grimaces distastefully.
his headache is a full-blown, full-out, migraine. he’s seeing spots in his vision. he’s swaying ever so slightly from the perpetual dizziness that won’t fucking leave him be. he’s in a state of such havoc all through his body, inside and out. he genuinely feels like a corpse.
he moves until there’s nothing left for him to do anymore. after obsessively checking the stock, he topples over to the floor again, slumping against a wall for support, head lolling over his sagging shoulders. his eyelids were drooping, face relaxing, body curling up. the clutches of sleep are taunting him, hanging the idea over his head. he wants to cry.
but he can’t let himself cry over something so stupid, no matter how frustrating it is. it takes too much energy that he just simply, doesn’t have. and he doesn’t think he can stand feeling any more pathetic for himself.
he tucks his knees to his chest. clutching at the sopping denim of his worn-out work jeans for some purchase, to ground himself. was he going to die? getting sleep is like an- essential aspect of living, right? how much can a human take until their body just shuts down? let alone a scrawny, overworked teenage boy?
to add to his already extensive list of physical aches, a sharp, brusque stabbing pain shoots into his abdomen. he holds his knees tighter to himself, gritting his teeth painfully. the hunger pains are finally hitting, his body apparently not catching up after a proper couple of days without a real meal.
swallowing down another wave of nausea was of herculean effort. his insides gnawed onto each other, craving any sort of substance to fill the overwhelming feeling of emptiness within him.
to his absolute dismay, the door swings open. as he feared, he’s pretty sure that since he’s stilled himself, the concept of getting back into motion was insurmountable. he makes a noise, something semblant of a pained animal whimper or mewl. he blinks torpidly to fight the tears welling. and, to try and get his vision in focus enough to see which of his parents were in the doorway.
what he did not anticipate was to feel a warm hand caressing his face. tweek finds himself dumbly leaning into it without any hesitance. he doesn’t find it in himself to be scared by the idea of a presence he isn’t fully aware of touching him. he’d be longing for it, craving for it, starved. something is said to him, but he is unsure of what.
following this, a pair of arms is encasing his beat-down body in a firm, grounding hold. tweek’s cheeks are becoming colder. his face is too numb to know he is crying, the wet streaking all the way from his bleary eyes to his trembling jaw. he just knows his shoulders shake with the amount of effort it takes to produce out a sob.
“-honey. honey?” a voice comes in through his head. it’s of pure concern. his tears are being gently wiped. “it’s okay, baby, you’re gonna be okay. it’s just me, craig.” craig cradles him practically, pulling tweek into his lap and holding him around the middle. tweek jumps back, bewildered by a new sense of fear.
“you can’t be here man, my parents are gonna… fucking kill me.” he sounds delirious. voice fragile. his throat raw. tweek’s clutching to craig’s jacket, the force seems desperate.
“fuck your stupid parents.” craig spits out. it made him so angry that tweek’s even here in the first place. “talk to me, babe. what’s going on?” his voice softened. tweek nudged his nose further into craig’s shoulder.
“ i don’t know.” he sobs hoarsely. he’s forgotten how to piece words together in a comprehensible way. “can’t sleep ‘nymore. my body and brain are all eating itself and i’m so, so mad. i don’t know, i don’t know. i’m so tired .” craig braces tweek’s neck and brushes the small, fine hairs on the nape.
“i know,” craig soothes.
“ i want to take a nap. ” tweek sputters sadly. he has no more effort to try and garner any fight in him. he's babbling almost childishly.
“i know,” craig repeats once more, kissing tweek gently on the top of his head.
“shift doesn’t end ‘til late.” tweek cries. he sounds much more frustrated each word he utters.
craig shakes his head. “that doesn’t matter. i’m taking you home.”
tweek shakes his head, too. “my parents-” he is absolutely terrified. his parents have been completely on his ass way more than by any means reasonable, nowadays. he can't go through another lecture. or getting ignored. or getting his ass kicked. he's never been so utterly sick of anything. but, his protesting is not taken into consideration. clearly, there is no room for arguing.
“ tweek. ” craig cuts him short. he sounds desperate, now, too. “my mom is threatening to call the cops, i’m serious. you need to come and sleep.” tweek unwillingly goes limp, every word, every movement, every emotion seeps out of him then and there. he has nothing left at all.
craig swoops him to his feet, then, picks him up to keep tweek from having to even begin to attempt to process how to stand . out the back door, into the parking lot, and back to craig’s car.