Work Text:
One.
Two.
Three.
Three lonely years. Each one marked by the one day that breaks the cycle. The day where he wakes up to a plain white card on his nightstand. With black ink carved into the white page, with messy, cursive handwriting staring right back at him. Only once, however, had it been accompanied with a small, stale slice of cake.
It hadn’t tasted right. The spongy texture had been far too dry for his liking. The taste had been bland. The bite almost warm. It had made him sick, afterward. Made him realize just how hungry he had become. Rotting in his bed. Wasting away, alive mentally, however dead physically.
But it’s different now.
He still dreams. Still resides in headspace whenever he chooses to go to sleep. But he’s not confined. Not trapped, not like he used to be. He lays there now. Awake. Aware. Eyes boring into the ceiling, body heavy and weak, brain fatigued and slow. He could only describe it as a state of self-inflicted paralysis.
But on some of these days, he’d wake up hungry and confused. Maybe even cold and clammy if he was feeling particularly unwell. Yet, it always came back to headspace. The only time he ever felt truly free. The only time where he would forget his pressing problems. Where he didn’t have to worry about the cause of the numb feeling in his aching chest. Even if he already knew what it was. What it meant. Represented.
But this time. This time, for the first time in a long time, does he feel the dull ache of guilt. He can feel the empty knot writhing within him. Self-loathing washes over him in a cold sweat, hands shaky and numb, body shivering under the prickly goosebumps that had begun to rise along his pale skin.
And it really doesn’t feel real.
He’s scrawny and malnourished. His body is eating away at what little of him remains, trying so hard to rationalize the small meals he forces down once every couple of days at the minimum. He’s barely alive, really. And he knows it. Doesn’t need some stupid scale to show him just how much he loses a month. He can see it. Can feel it.
But still, he feels no obligation to change it.
And he wonders, briefly, how he’s still alive. How he hasn’t slipped into a self-induced coma. And so desperately, he wants to know what it’d be like to just let it consume him. To ignore the flare and sudden nausea of being so sickeningly hungry. What if he let that pain grow and grow? What if he let it eat him from the inside out? Let it pull him under in a way he could never hope to achieve by himself.
But he doesn’t. He could never.
Because there’s still hope. A slithering, malicious thing of hope that keeps him from collapsing. That forces him to get up from the comfort of his bed, of his dreams. It would be so much easier if he just let himself die. If he just denied all of the things his body needed to survive.
He figures it’d be like going to sleep. Just without the dreams to keep him company. He wouldn’t have to worry about food or water. About… About the others.
He wishes. Wishes that the instinct, the want to live, wasn’t so strong. That the ache in his chest was less than… than just the ache it really was.
He knows. He knows so many things. But he deserves it, he tells himself. It’s been three years. Three years since he shut himself away.
Today, he is fifteen.
This, he only knows because of what he had said. What had been given to him yesterday. A small box. Wrapped in floral wrapping paper, with a cheap stick-on bow to mark the top of it. There was no card. There were no formalities. Just four spoken words. And that had been it.
That box. Was still there. Untouched since yesterday. Since he had set it down. But he hadn’t been forced to open it. Hadn’t really wanted to anyway. But now it made him feel something, a thing akin to an ever-growing flower of guilt. A deep, deep pit of… of feeling that had settled inside his stomach. Eating away at… him.
But he didn’t want to.
Why should he have to?
Because his only friend had given it to him?
Cared about him?
It didn’t mean anything.
He didn’t care.
He didn’t.