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There's forever a whirling inferno inside Logan's ribcage. It compactly traps his organs into its fiery claws, what was once supposed to be blood and vessel and life burnt asunder. It is at these very moments that Logan most empathizes with the stars. With the continuous bounce of particle against particle, a rapid flame that vomits its luminosity into distant planets.
When taut and baked, the flame always prods at his eyeballs. They itch as if sore, as if Logan's eyes would melt into puddles if he opens them up. It's always the first tell-tale sign of his ever-growing problem, and he misses the subtlety of enforced apathy — his body its own sensory deprivation tank for the sporadic anomaly within.
Logan takes a moment to breathe as he wraps his arms around his chest, his right hand positioned atop his heart. It pumps erratically like a fish on the run. This is his one hundred, twenty-first time experiencing such this year, and despite how many times he plasters potential solutions on the sticky notes against his whiteboard, the scorch grafting his heart and his gravelly vision worsen tenfold, making him keel into himself on his unkempt bed, his legs uncomfortably dangling at the side.
He reminds himself of an old woman clutching a rosary at the back row of a church, repeating Hail Mary's until the metal carving of Jesus on the crucifix nicks her thumb.
It's funny. Comedic. What is Logan even praying to?
He just clutches and clutches, uneven fingernails clawing at his upper arms. He keeps tightening his self-hug as if trying to keep something from jumping away. If he lets go, if he softens, he feels that light would shoot out of him like a powerful geyser. He would go blind looking at it, the heterogenous mixture of potential and hope and personhood blasting out of him.
Is this what the center of the universe felt, when the first protons and electrons collided and spread out? When it watched all that it is spread thin in a way so infinite?
A growl escapes his chapped lips. Who is he to complain when his weakness caused all this. The unconditionality his heart possesses is such a treacherous little sickness, his skin blazing thousands of Kelvin hot as he was burnt alive once more.
The disease tells him to do so much. It urges him to break things. To scream until his throat becomes raw and bloodied. He wants to scar his knuckles until his fingers are physically dysfunctional. He wants to throw up. Blood, vomit, sense — he wants to dispose of all his innards until he becomes that hollow servant he so desires to become.
He would give anything to let his assigned fate align with want. With his yearnings.
The thought only tightens the tension in his chest and torso. He strains his neck to plunge his face into his pillow, a grating scream rushing past his lips. The sound is muffled in his ears; muffled by the static, the mutedness. Nothing is fixed after that. Nothing feels any less disgusting.
A searing wisp engulfs his heart. His thoughts scramble with a calling for justice. “Why did you make me like this,” he murmurs into his pillow. His eyes become their own twin flames. “Why did you make me?!”
To be a side is to be a reflection of your human, and to be a side is to be a reflection, and to be a side is reflect, and to be a side is to be—
Logan suddenly jolts upwards, his fists gripping his bedsheets.
“You can't fucking tell me that love prevails any circumstance!” he yells with a coarse rasp, staring at his ceiling. They are blank. He has thrown all his glow-in-the-dark stickers away. His hands worm towards his ears, skewing his glasses slightly. “You're a— you can't do this!”
When the ringing and coursing pain does not stop, his hands abruptly disconnect from his face to grab at his pillow once more. He contemplates smothering himself once more until he's hit with a sudden surge of Cassandrian hurt, his arms swiftly tossing the thing towards the furniture behind him.
A thwack, some rattling. A wooden frame squeaks against where it's hung by a nail.
Logan stares at it.
It's a spectre, that paper framed and hung at the corner of his room. Bad feng shui; a door directly positioned in front of his bed. It is its own kind of evil portal, a spawn point for all of Logan's misfortunes.
Logan ambles to it with a thrum in his wrists.
“You have forsaken me,” he tells the thing, the gothic font expressing thanks staring back like a mockery. “You fucking lied to me.”
Thomas never wanted this. Thomas never wanted the expertise. Logan was a cage and now he is rusted metal scraps, and yet Thomas refers to him like he is an insatiable tick. Diploma this, engineering that — that was all for naught! Don't you get it, Logan? It was you alone who wasted our time!
“Why did I even waste my existence on you,” Logan says as he places his palms flat against the wooden panels. “What were you even for?”
It doesn't take long for the abscess in him to burst one more, his sorrow a mixture of mucus and acid and shit and everything radioactive. His left fist an explosive firework, he raises his arm, shoulder blade cracking, and aims for the glass reflection of his crooked face—
And it lands on the wall.
The plaster beneath his aching fingers crumble slightly, the already-existing dent blooming into the shape of his hand even more.
Logan inhales and exhales heavily. The snake eats its own tail, once again.
His ablaze eyes become stone as he feels moisture rolling down his sullen cheeks. His fist remains in the same spot, his face leveled with the diploma. All he sees in front of him is the serif title of Thomas’ name and his lost degree, haunted by the distraught, pathetic contortion that is Logan's reflected face.
Later, he knows he will fix his tie and try to get some work done. He will eat breakfast with the sides the next morning. He will periodically check if Thomas is on-schedule with his work and his doctor's appointments and hangouts. Once a week, he will entertain the thought of closing the Pandora's Box that he is and put an end to his existence — and he actually does it. But he wakes up in the same bed with the same ache and the same cursed thoughts.
What a fool.
Logan screams unfiltered into the polished glass.
It's dissonant, tainted with phlegm-induced gargles. He digs his fist further into the wall despite his cut skin as he waits for this moment to pass, his forehead a mere inch away from the frame.
When it does, when the candle wick sizzles out from a small, cold breeze, he feels his body melt into a pile of ash. His arms automatically wrap itself around the cavity that is his body, ignoring the way blood drips from his fingers down to his elbow. Instead, like the droplets, he sinks onto the floor, knees clinging onto each other as he comes face-to-face with dusty wall gutters.
It's a trough-like moment — a held breath of waiting for things to pass over. “It will be,” he murmurs shakily like a prayer, “like this again. It will be like this again, and I will just have to get used to it. Forever.”