Work Text:
The day you move into your own apartment, all you do is shove the leftover takeout into the fridge once your parents leave, put your phone on charge, and fall asleep on the sofa.
The day after that, you buy a gun.
It's easier than you'd like it to be, but you shove that thought aside because the shitty laws in this state benefit you right now. You get less questions buying the gun than you do the rope. But maybe that's just because you loaded up your shopping cart with serial killer essentials, like the cashier joked, before she took in just how much stuff you were buying. Rope. Bleach. Matches. A stupid amount of kitchen knives, more than anyone would ever need to cook. Half a dozen kinds of painkillers. Pesticide. Gallons of pesticide. Enough razor blades that the cashier goes silent as she scans them, staring at you with wide eyes as you pay with cash. You shake your head when she asks if you want a receipt. You plan on keeping everything.
Sun's out. Your apartment's within walking distance, which is handy because you can't afford a car yet, and letting your parents pay for that as well feels wrong. They're already doing too much. The new phone, new clothes, new furniture for your new home in a neighbourhood that's too fucking good for you. The same AAC app Aspen and Birdie bought, and that alone is enough to make you guilty. Months spent living in their house while you recovered, months of eating their food and leeching off their Wi-Fi. Hospital bills and a testosterone prescription. A hysterectomy. A cremation for Sophie, because you hadn't wanted her in the dirt where the worms could get her.
They won't let you owe them for any of it. Dad had cried when you promised you'd start paying them back as soon as you got a job, and Mom just looked at you, her face so soft, the way she did when she buckled your seatbelt for you in the car because you wouldn't let go of Sophie.
"Let us take care of you," She'd said. "We didn't- for such a long time, all we could do for you was pray that you were safe, wherever you were. But we're here now. Please, baby. Let us help."
You'd thought of all that time you spent thinking you could never go home again, and nodded.
The apartment is roughly the size of a postage stamp, but the heating works normally, and your upstairs neighbours turn off their music at eight like clockwork, so it's about as close to perfect as you can imagine.
It takes you less than ten minutes to unpack what you were too lazy to last night; a single cardboard box of dishware and some clothes, because you don't own anything else yet. Probably won't for a while. You spent a lot today. Nothing you didn't need, but you're going to be on a tight budget until your next pay cheque. And you're about to kiss goodbye to your security deposit.
You meticulously cut little mouseholes into the walls in spots where furniture will hide them, half a dozen of them in every room, unscrewing vents when you run out of places to cut, and start to portion out your supplies. A knife, a box of matches, a strip of Tylenol that's well over what the lethal dosage is supposed to be. Carefully, you tuck them into the walls and out of sight. Practise a few times, making sure that you can reach in and grab everything quickly without having to wriggle around too much. It's easy. You wrap razor blades in tissues and tape them on the underside of chairs and tables and windowsills. You empty out every kind of bottle you can hide in plain sight and fill it with pesticide - shampoo, hand soap, cleaning supplies, white vinegar - and pray you never forget which ones you've swapped out. What a way to go out that would be. You Google how to tie a noose and make a passable one after a few tries. That gets stuffed inside your mattress once you cut it open.
When you're done, you eat yesterday's leftovers and take the trash out. It's quiet in your head. Not that blissful kind of quiet you used to get looking at the Hive or pinned under Levi, knowing that you didn't have to think at all, you didn't have to do or be anything, just let yourself be used as a vessel, but regular quiet. Calm quiet. No longer buzzing all the time. Able to sit and hear yourself think. The kind of quiet that doesn't beg for a distraction from the awful reality of being yourself. Everything feels very still, like the world's moving a little less fast. You load and unload your gun, put it beneath your pillow, and go to sleep. You don't dream.
After that, you start to settle into something like a life again.
The buses are always late. You get the early one because it's either that or show up twenty minutes late, and besides, you can just walk slowly from your stop. You work at another gas station, because you're nothing if not a masochist. It's not bad. Ronnie, your manager, spends most of the workday getting stoned in her office, but she doesn't ask questions, and she doesn't wince when she looks at your burns, so you don't care about having to pick up her slack. It's still less than you'd had to do after Harry died and before Jess arrived.
You miss them, in a weird way. Tammy too. Fuck, even Levi sometimes. But you're glad that Harry's dead, that Jess is gone, that one way or another, they made it out of there. You have to believe that Jess is safe somewhere in California. You don't want to be the only one who made it out alive.
A week passes, and then a month, and most of the time, it feels like each day you become a little more like a real person. It gets boring sometimes, not being numb all the time. Living through all the moments that make up a day.
You find that you kind of like being boring. The same as any other guy on the street, despite everything. You go to work and listen to your coworkers talk about the broken coffee machine and baseball, and you mop up spilt soda instead of blood, and there's nothing but junk in the storage closet. You have dinner with your parents and give short, uninteresting answers about how you're doing - Bought eggs. Went for a walk. Saw two magpies - which they listen to, rapt.
Three months in, you almost work up the nerve to message Aspen and Birdie. You don't quite manage it. And you feel fucking pathetic, unable to believe you're just letting them live thinking you don't want them, but you can't make yourself hit 'send.' The world keeps turning anyway. You make pasta, watch your neighbour's dog for an evening, buy an ugly houseplant. Maybe you can't do it today, but there's still tomorrow. There always is.
Sometimes you miss having someone to tell you what to do, letting them live your life for you, not having to be a human being. You miss having a purpose, being made useful. You miss the Hive. Being alive is difficult. It's boring. It's terrifying, when you let yourself think about it.
And you don't need to be doing any of this. It would be so, so easy to kill yourself in any of the dozens of ways you'd neatly laid out.
That's most of the reason why you don't do it; because you could if you wanted. Paradoxically, having the option open to you makes you not want to take it. It's funny. How is it that out of everything you have going for you, that's what helps the most?
On bad days, you draw the curtains and turn off all the lights, and double-check you can find each one of your emergency stashes in the dark. Behind the couch, the leg of the tiny dining room table pressed against one wall, inside the cupboard behind the pots and pans. Bundled up safely in layers of ziploc bags and hidden inside the toilet lid. Under the bed, behind the headboard. One behind the bedside drawers and another in the loose floorboard beneath it. There's a kit in every vent in the apartment. You practise searching them quietly, holding your breath. Making sure nothing's missing. Some days, that's all you need to calm down and remember things are different now; just to know that if you need them, you have options.
And there's still the really, really bad days, where all you can think about is how much you don't want to be in control of yourself, how you'd do anything for a car to swerve into you and burst into flames, for a low hum at the back of your mind saying 'hush, our child, we know you,' where you put your gun in your mouth and wish someone else were here to pull the trigger. And the guilt crawls over you, thinking about how ungrateful you are to even consider killing yourself. All the work your parents have put into giving you back your life, supporting you even after all this time, even knowing what you've done. How worried do we have to be about you? In Aspen's soft voice. Stagger, and every moment you hated him for keeping you alive, right alongside every moment you were so fucking glad to have him there, because at least there was someone who gave a shit. You still want to die. Despite everything, sometimes, you still want to die. And it would be so easy to just go ahead and do it.
It's the kind of thing you know you should tell somebody about. Let them come over and sweep your apartment for sharps and pills, hide away everything that you could use to hurt yourself, baby-proof it so that you'll be safe no matter how much you don't want to be. But you can't do that again. Can't stomach the thought of being held captive, even by the people who love you. You won't kill yourself. Probably. You've always been too much of a coward, always wanted someone else to take the choice from you. You don't need the door open for an escape, you just need it open for air.
This makes you feel better than anything healthy, or sane, or rational ever could. It's your security net, your safety blanket. It's a promise to yourself that you will never, ever let what happened to you happen again, that from now on, your life is yours and yours alone. You're capable of making decisions. Of talking, of thinking, of being an actual human being. If you want to die, you'll die. If you have nothing else, you've got the dignity of being able to make a choice.
So you buy groceries, and you go to work, and you fall asleep on the couch watching bad TV. You visit your parents and you text your coworkers. You get a new tattoo. And you let yourself think about the future. Being able to say more than four words at a time before your voice gives way. Looking for Jess and reaching out to her, knowing for certain that she's okay. Sleeping in Aspen and Birdie's bed like you belong there, getting woken up too early because Luna decided if she's awake, everyone else should be awake to play with her. The kind of things that should seem like pipe dreams and aren't - not anymore.
It's all so ordinary that you can't believe someone like you gets to live like this. It doesn't feel as wrong as you'd thought it would. Just different. Maybe you'll even get used to it, someday. But it's alright if you don't; being here, getting to have this at all, it's enough.
You're still here. Not because you aren't allowed to die, but because you're choosing to live.