Chapter Text
Schroeder doesn’t like to talk about his feelings. This makes people think he’s unfeeling.
He’s not, though. If anything, he feels too much. Take that however you can, there isn’t a single way it doesn’t work.
His chest hurts.
Not just his chest. Everything.
He lies on his back on top of his perfectly-made bed, fully clothed, bathed in the afternoon light filtering through the curtains. Some people put glowing stars on their ceilings, or stick posters up there, but Schroeder always found that too disorderly.
Tears blur his vision, and the ceiling warps, a thick blur of white paint overhead growing closer and closer as if it’ll crash into him at any moment.
Schroeder remembers feeling like his lungs were full of plaster. Plaster or maybe water, something heavy that weighed him down and prevented breathing. He still has trouble these days. Some things are harder than others, but really, what can he do but paste on a fake smile and pretend everything is okay?
Apparently Linus blew up at Lucy while he was in the hospital, furious that she’d go so far. She had to know that Schroeder would go after his piano, had to know how sick sewer water makes a person. Had to remember his OCD, that being down there was among his worst nightmares.
Lucy swore up and down that she didn’t.
His fault.
Charlie Brown said he should have seen it, the one time Linus actually got mad at Lucy, but Schroeder was glad he’d been too sick to be there. He hates conflict, hates having other people fight his battles (though he won’t fight them himself, he just doesn’t tell people about his problems), hates being the reason anyone would react that way.
Hates himself, admittedly.
Schroeder curls on his side, fisting the quilt his mother made for him so carefully while he was in the hospital, staying up all night to make every stitch as perfect as possible. Tears wet the fabric (stupid, disgusting, ungrateful, ruining it with your filth) as he tries to muffle the sound of his sobs so his parents won’t hear.
She’s always there, somehow. Always in his personal space, leaning on his piano, pressuring him constantly with declarations of love and insistence that he reciprocate.
And he can’t.
His parents say he should at least give her something, that it’s sweet how interested she is, that they’d be a cute couple.
Schroeder would stop playing piano for good before he told them otherwise.
Why stir the shit when he knows for a fact that Lucy won’t stop no matter what?
His parents like Lucy anyway, to the point of even inviting her over for meals, where she scoots her chair too close to his and leans on him no matter how often he pulls away, and what he can’t tell her, what he can’t tell anyone, is that the touch hurts.
Physical contact hurts, and it sounds so stupid but it’s true, and there’s no other way for Schroeder to put it. It’s not so bad when he’s the one initiating it, but he’s never liked any kind of touch. His mother has always lamented that she can’t even hug her own son, so he sucks it up and ignores the pain as he clings to her and pretends he’s okay with being held, pretends it doesn’t feel like his skin is being rubbed with sandpaper, tries to force the good of the hugs to outweigh the bad.
The problem with Lucy is that she’s always touching him. Hugging him, hanging onto his arm, trying to kiss him (and sometimes succeeding, which is the worst of all). If his mother’s touch is sandpaper, Lucy’s is hot needles. But Schroeder has never been one for complaints, so he just bears it until he snaps (which he usually covers up frantically by backtracking and masking, as he did with that godawful camp song).
He’s good at that, at least. Schroeder often fights a losing battle with his failings (something he relates to Charlie Brown on but would never admit), but if he had to say he was good at anything, it would be piano and hiding his feelings.
That’s easier, Schroeder thinks. Don’t burden anyone with your stupid thoughts and insipid feelings. He even managed to hide what really happened to his piano from his parents, saying he’d lost his grip while carrying it to a gathering of his friends and gone after it, rather than the truth of Lucy being to blame.
A familiar knock makes Schroeder’s heart freeze in his chest, yanking him back into reality as he hears the call of Lucy’s familiar voice.
Some things never change, he supposes.
But at least Schroeder is good at pretending to be okay.