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"This is your fault."
Fear and panic long ago settled in Mike's chest, so hearing this surely won't effect him, right? No, these words are something he's dreaded, something he's secretly thought, hidden in the dark shadows of a mind he can barely control. These words feed into his worst fear: the fear that everything that's happened to Will since his kidnapping is Mike's fault for not offering a sleepover or anything of the sort.
Something, anything, to keep Will safe from the horrors Henry had given him.
"Everything - Any pain he's felt is because of you; it is because of your selfishness and stupidity."
Henry's voice strikes home, feeling like a sword of Mike's own making in his beating heart, bloody and torturous and all his fault.
Because it is, isn't it? Mike's heart had grown cold for those few moments, enough to doom his best friend to a cycle of trauma he'd probably never escape from. Mike hadn't spared a thought despite a nagging feeling tugging at his strings.
Mike's chest rises and falls quickly, lungs trying to keep up with how hard it's getting to breathe. His eyes, squeezed tightly shut to attempt to block out the hellish landscape he's found himself in.
"And here I thought you cared for him."
Thump, thump, thump, thump.
"I thought you loved him."
In and out. In... and out.
Thump, thump, thump, thump.
"Like father, like son, Michael."
Mike's eyes snap open in shock, the visual already planted in his head. Himself, older, with a face-less wife and three unknown children, uncaring and apathetic. Just sitting in that fucking recliner, eyes glued to a screen when he isn't ignoring his family around the dining table. They speak around him, but he says not one damn word. He can't even make out their faces - all blurred things that imply he has no desire to know them. That he's only there to fill a gap and nothing more.
A hand covers his face, and Mike doesn't even scream.