Work Text:
Mikey was laying in her loft bed, fiddling with a pair of nail clippers as a Youtube playthrough played from their laptop. It was a playlist she’d seen several times already from one of their comfort youtubers. Even with the familiar background noise, her focus shifted from the video to general zoning and the clippers.
It was just a pair of nail clippers, nothing special other than the jokey foot shape. There was a matching hand one resting somewhere on the bed’s top stair. They’d been a useful joke gift that she used often.
They sat up, shifting so that her left leg was folded against the mattress to catch her foot on her right ankle as the right knee came up to rest against their shoulder. Barely faded lines were scattered across the scale-like skin of her shins. Three decorated each leg, a thinner line from a different source was barely hidden by their shorts.
The video was simply background noise at this point as she focused on the steadily growing heavy feeling in her chest. It was dull yet somehow sharp at the same time. It was just there and they hated it. It wasn’t there before but it was now and it was so fucking common and shouldn’t be there-
They huffed before turning the arm on the clippers to let it work easier and examining her skin.
There was a pattern.
A method to the canvas that’ll soon be graced with new strokes of red.
She pressed the clippers against their skin, pushing with just enough force to have some skin pushed up between the blades. She took a few breaths ignoring how the feeling receded just enough for the slightest hint of nausea to poke through as she pressed down the arm. She pushed down the slowly growing nausea as she kept applying pressure, adding to the stinging feeling of the pinch. She eventually let up the pressure when the blades finally met through the flesh between them.
She simply looked at the now mostly separated strip of skin for a moment, admiring the lines of red on the edges before clipping the still connected ends. They tossed the liberated strip off the side of the bed and looked at the clippers and cut. The blades had a thin shine of crimson on the inside that she wiped off the best she could with a sheet.
The cut had filled out with blood as she simply watched the mass of red slowly and steadily grow. They poked and pressed around the cut with a finger. She occasionally pressed a sheet against it to soak up the blood before pinching around the cut to watch the shapes fill up again. She repeated the action a few more times before leaning over to reach behind some various things on the bed’s top stair, settling back with a bandaid in her hands. She idly watched the cut steadily refill as she took the bandaid out of the wrapping. They carefully covered the cut, making sure the bandaid was secured well before climbing down the stairs and throwing away the paper.
She climbed back into bed and settled under the soft blankets, paying some attention to the video that was playing as her thoughts wandered.
They needed to stop. She kept getting nauseous whenever she did this. It couldn’t just happen anymore. Just that tiny fucking feeling turned this from neutral and the tiniest bit positive to negative.
It didn’t shut the feeling up as well anymore.
It didn’t do its job anymore.
It was annoying.