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Your fingers are raw. The skin is pink and cracked, ridged like an old map where water once carved its path too many times. Your knuckles look more like exposed bark than skin, and every movement feels like dragging glass across tissue. The backs of your hands are blotched and swollen, a mural of strain and compulsion painted in stinging red. You can’t remember how long you’ve been standing here, palms under scalding water, lathering and scrubbing and rinsing, over and over. The tap runs like a scream you’ve tuned out, white noise that vibrates in your skull, your breaths shallow and fast, chest tight as though the walls are closing in.
Contamination. That invisible filth you can’t wash away. It’s not logic. It’s certainty — that your hands aren’t clean enough. That if you stop, something terrible will happen. You know it makes no sense. You know it’s not rational. But your body doesn’t care. Your body is already halfway to catastrophe. Your body is following rules carved into your bones. The rules scream louder than your thoughts. Louder than your heartbeat. Louder than everything.
Soap again. Rinse again. Lather. Scrub. Rinse. Again. Again. Again. The sting on your knuckles doesn’t even register now. You scrub until your hands feel like paper, until you can almost see blood rise beneath the thinnest layers of skin. Until the burn is the only thing louder than the thoughts. Until the pain starts to feel like proof. Like maybe if it hurts enough, the fear will leave.
“You’re hurting yourself.”
His voice is a quiet thread in the storm. Regulus.
You don’t turn. Can’t. Movement feels impossible when the compulsion locks your body in place like a cage. The shame hits harder than the scalding water. He wasn’t supposed to see this. Not like this. Not the mess. Not the broken parts. Not the version of you held together by rituals and cracked skin.
But he doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t fill the air with questions or pity or solutions. Just closes the door behind him with a soft click and leans against the cabinet behind you. Close, but not touching. No intrusion. Just presence. Just him, steady in a space where nothing else feels stable.
“There’s a kind of moss,” he begins, voice low and even, “that only grows on the north side of trees. Did you know that? Some say you can use it to find your way if you’re lost in a forest.”
You grit your teeth, hands still moving. Lather. Scrub. Rinse. Repeat. Again. Again. Again. Your shoulders ache from the tension. Your eyes sting. You don’t even know if you’re crying or if it’s just the water and exhaustion blurring your vision.
“And there’s a galaxy,” he continues, “about 65 million light years away. NGC 4921. It’s classified as a barred spiral. The kind that looks like someone spun sugar into stars.”
His voice is velvet. The kind that you could fall into if you let yourself. He speaks without urgency, as though this is just a quiet night in the library, reading aloud from a favourite book. Calm. Steady. Certain. Something about his tone cuts through the fog. Something about it makes the water feel just a little less deafening.
“When they took pictures of it, they found lines of gas threading out like silver filaments. It looked fragile. Like it could shatter if you breathed on it. But it’s survived collisions. Eons. It holds its shape anyway.”
Your fingers are trembling. The soap slips from your grip, clatters in the sink like a gunshot. You breathe hard through your nose, trying to suppress the rising tide of panic, but it swells anyway, all the way to your throat. Your vision pulses at the edges. The compulsion screams to pick the soap up again. Just once more. Just to be sure.
“Regulus… I can’t stop.”
“I know,” he says gently. “But you paused. Just then. That matters.”
You stand there, chest heaving, unsure what to do now that your hands are empty. You don’t know what comes after the ritual. You’re not even sure who you are without it. There’s no script for what happens next.
He shifts, not closer, not yet. Just enough to reach for the towel folded beside him. He unfolds it slowly, deliberately, as though each motion carries weight. No sudden movements. No rush. Just intention. Just care.
“Let me help.”
Your hands hover in the air. Red. Raw. Shaking. And still, some part of you wants to pull away. To go back to the water. To do just one more cycle. Just to be sure. But another part of you, the quieter part, stays. Listens.
But Regulus doesn’t push. He waits. Head tilted slightly, eyes dark and steady. He waits like he’s got all night. Like you’re worth waiting for. Like you’re not a burden. Like this isn’t too much.
You let him take your hands.
The towel is soft. Worn. Warm from being held. He dries you gently, reverently, dabbing at the spaces between your fingers like they’re precious. Like you are. He doesn’t rush through it. Doesn’t shy away from the worst spots. His hands are steady, careful, as if touching anything too quickly might make you vanish. He dries each finger with care, almost like a ritual of his own, one born not of fear but of love.
“There,” he murmurs, finishing with your wrists. He sets the towel aside like it matters, like everything in this moment is sacred. Like nothing else exists beyond the walls of this room.
Then, wordlessly, he holds out his own hands.
They tremble. Not from cold, but from restraint. You see it in the tightness of his jaw, the quiet control, the way his thumbs curl inward slightly. The way he doesn’t reach out without your permission.
“I want to touch you,” he says simply. “But only if you say yes.”
You nod. It takes effort. Your voice is gone, swallowed by the noise in your chest. But your nod is enough.
When he gathers you against him, it’s careful. Arms around your shoulders, his cheek against your hair. His warmth bleeds into your skin like light into a cracked wall. You don’t realise how cold you were until you feel it. How empty. How desperately you needed this.
“One breath at a time,” he says, voice muffled against your temple.
You inhale. And for the first time in hours, it goes all the way down. It reaches the hollow places. It doesn’t catch in your throat.
His chest rises and falls with yours. You can feel his heartbeat, steady but fast, like he’s not as calm as he seems. And that makes you feel less alone. Like even this, even now, is something he wants to carry with you. His fingers stay still against your back, patient and grounding. He doesn’t speak again. He just breathes with you.
“We’ll fight it together,” he says, barely above a whisper. “Not just tonight. All of it. Whenever it comes. However long it takes.”
And this time, when you breathe, it doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t feel like drowning.
You stay like that. For seconds. For minutes. For however long the world allows. And when the noise comes back again, as you know it will, you trust that his voice will be there to meet it. Quiet. Steady. Real. And maybe that’s enough.
Maybe it’s the beginning of enough.