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It's nights like this where the sheets around his body are too close too tight and he has to kick them off with his breath coming too hard too fast and then he rips off his shirt and his sports bra too and just lies in bed staring at the ceiling suffocating even from that being between him and the cold night air and he wonders if that's how Josh feels, down there all alone, oh God why didn't he go back-
He gets up and paces for a while, listens to the pat pat pat of his bare feet against the floor of his room in his parent's house, he'd gone back there instead of school because how could he learn when his mind was just Josh Josh Josh -
And then he goes to the kitchen and doesn't bother flicking on the light because it hurts his eyes and he doesn't wear his glasses because he didn't care to see his house or anything really, he just wanted to shut his eyes to the world and sleep for days - which, of course, was what he'd been doing, he wasn't brave or strong enough to pretend to be alright, he was just a pathetic shell of who he used to be -
He stops in the middle of the kitchen, breathing too fast; he tries to slow everything down like his new therapist told him to, tries to inhale then exhale, deep and steady. It ends up making him calm down enough for tears to form in his eyes and he leans against the fridge and grips his arms too tight and tries.
He tries to think of Josh how he knows the others do.
He tries to think of Josh as the villain.
He tries to think of Josh making him choose between his best friend and his crush.
He tries not to think about Josh all alone in the bottom of those mines, resorting to eating people, becoming a monster and whose fault is that, Chris, why didn't you look for him why did you abandon him you know what he's afraid of he's gone now look at what you've done-
It's impossible.
His parents try to understand. They let him do what he wants for the most part and for the most part he's grateful. They don't push him to talk to his friends or go outside or do anything but therapy, really. He eats in his room. Alone. He considers it punishment for his sins, though not nearly enough. He's a bad person. He doesn't deserve the kindness of his parents; he doesn't deserve a therapist; he doesn't deserve Sam occasionally messaging him in concern; he deserves to die alone like Josh had to.
And it's fitting, he thinks, that he should feel just like Josh did after his sisters died. It was fitting that they'd probably go out the same way, alone, because they drifted apart because Chris hadn't known what to say so he didn't even try, and then Josh had been ripped away and Chris hadn't reached out - Chris was a failure, a deadbeat, who let his best friend be killed or become a monster or God knows what - and he tries to breathe slow again.
Steady.
Josh was dead. Chris reassures himself that way; Josh was dead. Josh couldn't suffer if he was dead. Josh couldn't feel abandoned if he was dead. The thought of Josh being dead was simultaneously a weight and a relief.
If Josh was dead, was Chris a murderer?
He doesn't know the answer to the question, but he feels one.
He goes back upstairs and throws his shirt on and walks back downstairs feeling sluggish and useless and then goes outside, and the chill of the night air nips at his nose. Josh used to like his nose, he recalls - and then he stops himself recalling and he digs his nails into his arm again, wishing he could bleed without the use of pointy objects - after they'd found the scars on his thighs he wasn't allowed those anymore, because he'd slipped up like always, he was no liar, not like Josh, never like Josh, their only similarity in Chris' eyes was that he'd let them both down in the worst possible way -
He doesn't have any resolution to this, he realises. There was no way out of the feeling - there was no way out of the reality that he had been a coward and run away. He hadn't been enough, he'd never been enough, not enough to prevent the easily preventable because he'd been so wrapped up in his fucking infatuation with a girl he didn't even talk to anymore, and he'd never seen what now seemed obvious - unrequited love, Josh had said when he revealed himself, but he'd known Chris and Ash had liked each other - it was a detail that had slipped until it was far too late, and now Chris couldn't tell Josh the thing he'd probably been desperately hoping to hear all that time -
"I think I loved him," he tells the 4am street.
No cars pass by. No feral animals move in the darkness. No lights turn on at the revelation. The world is utterly still and uncaring. The world is just Chris and his breathing, and he sits down on the pavement and he can only think one thing.
Alone.