Chapter Text
Kei sighs, staring at the half-finished essay in front of him. As much as he wants to get on with and actually finish a piece of work, everything in his body is screaming at him to do anything else. He doesn’t even dislike chemistry, but the thought of writing another word about titration makes his chest ache with lack of motivation. He wills himself to carry on, chewing the end of his pencil for a moment before bracing himself to continue.
It’s completely useless.
He can’t even read the words he’s written, the characters swamping together across the lines of his page like inky white noise. He takes a second to clean his glasses with the hem of his t-shirt before making one final attempt to just read one fucking sentence.
Kei’s eyes water at the effort, and he gives into his lack of self-control, flopping face-first onto his unmade bed.
Pathetic, he thinks.
There’s supposedly nothing stopping him from just doing his work, but he physically cannot bring himself to do anything. He’s bored and tired despite the borderline unhealthy amounts of caffeine he’d consumed throughout the day, and there’s nothing he can do to get rid of the gaping hole of apathy that has apparently been ripped into his torso. He’s smart and studious and not usually distracted, but for the past few days he’s felt this way – unable to concentrate completely on anything, be it books or cartoons or the fucking schoolwork that he needs to actually do before the holidays end.
He bites his lip hard, unable to contain his frustration. This is bullshit – if he can’t do the things he’s supposed to be doing, can’t he at least procrastinate with something mindlessly entertaining like every single other person on the planet? Why the fuck is nothing interesting? He can barely bring himself to unstick his face from his pillow to check the time.
17:23. Too early to sleep. Fuck.
He knows it’s coming; he’s been trying to avoid it for weeks – the subtle static feeling under his skin, setting his nerves on edge, but not enough to warrant him doing anything about it. It seems stupid, to be considering it in the first place, let alone in the early evening whilst his whole family are awake and moving around the house. Still, he’s managed to ignore it for this long, so he concludes that waiting another few days for the feeling to subside won’t be too difficult.
Except it is. By quarter to six he’s checked the clock on his bedside table a total of seventeen times. It’s almost as though time has decided to slow down just for him. The static under his skin has slowly grown into a feeling more like his body trying to outgrow his skin - the muscles in his arms are suddenly hypersensitive, reacting to the unease of his body with slight contractions, and his blood seems to flow hotter and faster than usual.
He knows that this is months of pent up tension, and the annoying side-effects a habit he’s never been able to kick, but he still feels completely ridiculous that he’s reacting in this way because he can’t do his homework.
He feels pathetic and stupid and weird and uncomfortable and he does not want to be that guy who sits alone in his bedroom and hurts himself for no real reason, and yet here he is – up off his bed, lifting up a pile of textbooks on the corner of his shelf and breathing a sigh of relief that there’s still a pencil sharpener blade underneath. It’s not like anybody would have found it there anyway, but every time this happens Kei is gripped with the fear that he’ll somehow lose it behind the rest of his books, or that it would fall down behind his shelf and get sucked away when he vacuums his bedroom.
He slides down the side of his bed to sit on the floor, angled slightly away from the door so that he can quickly hide himself if anybody were to walk in. He takes the box of tissues down from his desk (that are usually only used for blowing his nose, thank you very much), as well as the box of band-aids from under his bed that he’d taken from the bathroom cabinet months previously, just in case.
He takes a breath and a moment to reconsider, balancing the weight of the stupidity and futility of what he’s about to do against the fact that he literally could not care any less at this point. He feels, for the first time in days, a sense of purpose and clarity, and actual anticipation for something other than sleep.
He stops thinking about it, realising that, if he doesn’t get on with it, it’ll be too late and he’ll have to go and eat dinner with the urge still crawling around his body.
He looks longingly at his pale forearms for a second, inspecting the barely-visible pearlescent lines littering them. They’re unnoticeable unless you know what you’re looking for, but Kei still often wishes he’d never done it somewhere so obvious when he was younger and naïve and still heavily entrenched in the habit. He’d like to think that he has more control over it now, but he knows in the back of his mind that the only time he has control is when he isn’t doing it. Still, his forearms were always the easiest to damage, bleed the most, and are generally more satisfying to destroy, but he isn’t going to go there – he can’t afford to take that risk when he constantly has his team looking at him in short sleeves, and he’s sure that somebody like Sugawara would know exactly what had happened if he turns up to practice with bandaged arms. The thought makes him feel slightly sick.
He takes to rolling up the sleeve of his shirt, so it sits thickly above his shoulder. It’s easier here – less risky. The scars on his upper arms are more prominent – thick, shiny, raised lumps of tissue in pink and white and pale lilac. They aren’t exactly attractive, but Kei finds them weirdly calming – though he’d hate to admit that he finds comfort in anything, especially the self-inflicted mess of at the tops of his arms. The main issue with it is that it’s difficult to cut around thicker scar tissue, but not difficult enough that he’s going to let it stop him. The newest marks here are a few months old, since he’s been too busy for this shit for quite some time. They’re soft brown lines – no real effort made in the first place, just letting off some steam before a match after a tense conversation with Yamaguchi. He can barely remember what it was about, but he didn’t want any feelings he might have had surrounding it to affect his game performance. It hadn’t been a big deal, and under normal circumstances he’d have left it. He feels stupid, looking at the faint strokes across his arm, that he’d actually cut himself over a not-argument that he can’t even remember. Pathetic, he thinks again.
He begins, firstly just pushing the edge of the metal into his arm, getting used to the sensation again. He then drags it slowly, gently across his skin, pulling at the wound to see if it’ll bleed at all. It doesn’t, so he goes again, fast this time, less gentle, pushing the corner of the blade down as an afterthought. He watches blood rise to the surface, filling the thin line and collecting in blobs along it, not quite enough to run. He goes again, pushing slightly harder for the entire time, but this time does not stop, instead moving again and again, pushing further as he makes his way down to where the hem of his volleyball shirt sleeve will stop. He’s tempted to keep going, just slightly further down so that somebody might notice when he lifts his arms up to block during practice. He’s being irrational now and he knows it, but he can’t help deliberately going lower than usual, where his sleeve will cover it completely until he moves. It’s stupid and weird and Kei knows that this is the sort of attention seeking bullshit that he sneers at, and he knows that once he’s out of this headspace he’ll regret it and do everything he can to hide it, but right now, right in this moment, he wants somebody to know.
He feels cold blood begin to run down his arm in congealing droplets, and fuck has he missed this. He kind of wants to do a bit more, but the urge is mostly gone and he’s beginning to come back down to Earth.
And then he really comes back down, scrambling for the tissues when he realises that it’s dripping off his elbow and onto his carpet. Nosebleed, he thinks – that’s what he’ll say if somebody asks.
Cleaning his arm, he feels half giddy, half the feeling you get when you finish getting off and actually look at the porn you were so into just moments prior. He feels ridiculous and strange, and he loves and hates the stinging pain that’s just started to flare up to his shoulder. He feels weird, but it’s more than he’s felt all week, and that’s enough for now.