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Panting, breaking out in a sweat, Monty slides down to the floor sat with his back against the metal sliding door to his green room. Wrapping his arms around his knees in attempt to make himself small even if he was anything but that. Trying to disappear out of these new feelings. Raw and exposed like everyone was staring at him despite being alone in his room. He hates it. He hates Freddy for making him feel this way. But most of all, he hates the traitorous part of him that wonders if Freddy might be right. He knows his counselors were wrong. Sitting in repose to empty his mind only filled it with more hatred of himself.
It almost felt like some ridiculous cursed quota of angry thoughts. A whirlwind of all Monty ever knew all his life from throwing tantrums as a kid to fighting his mind on the daily. The thought is almost laughable. Almost. And so was the dull throb pulsing through the injured skin of his knuckles he had punched off in his room. The bandage already soaked with his blood. He should clean it up.. yet the thought of moving, of leaving this moment behind filled him with a strange dread.
This moment of peace that was on the edge of comfortable and skin crawling. Freddy's presence weighed down on the other side of the door out in the cold hall of rockstar row. Light trademark music that was heavy in a way that made his head spin faster. He's not used to this kind of stillness, this heavy pause in the constant loud chaos of his mind. It's almost too much attention from the shining virtuoso who was sat on the other side of the door. Freddy. Who suddenly shocked that pause into a labyrinth of thoughts by three simple words.
“…You’re calm now.” hums the voice. The singers velvety voice that ran through Monty's mind. Freddy was barely doing anything and Monty felt like he would suffocate from one more minute of it. Yet he couldn't pull away either.
"I'm not calm." He says, no bite to his words, no anger as much as he wanted there to be. His eyes drift to the chaos he's left behind in his room from his egregious anger. Destruction and the smell of pain. He knows he's not calm, that's bullshit. But Freddy wasn't wrong either. There was that stillness. It's not calm.. not really. Freddy was calm. Of course he was, he went through this shit 100 times a day by guests when they need reassurance. But this vulnerability was a different symbiosis between them that was anything but natural. It was built over years of suffering and Machiavellian acts people have shoved onto them with no choice but to live with it.
"I'm trying." Monty adds. It's a small sudden admission, one tiny step through the formidable path ahead of him. Something not even Freddy expected to hear muttered through the cold metal door holding them apart. And in this moment, it feels like everything.