Work Text:
Seven was in his cabin, the farthest one of them all, rotting away in his bed like the miserable thing he was. The wind made the wood of the cabin creak, but not even that was enough to pull him out of his thoughts.
It had already been a while since the rounds had stopped, and even so, despite having done nothing for the team, he felt tired.
A thick, heavy kind of exhaustion that didn’t go away just by closing his eyes. His body ached at the mere thought of getting up and looking for something to eat. He didn’t deserve it.
Food had too many calories. He had already eaten enough. If he ate more, he would only hurt the team. He didn’t need that.
And yet, the feeling wouldn’t disappear. He felt too fat, too big, taking up space that didn’t belong to him.
He never understood how Noli wasn’t disgusted by him.
He never understood how c00lkidd could accept having such a horrible father.
He could never understand why Guest, Noob, or Chance even felt the need to start conversations with him. They knew he would never amount to anything, that there was nothing valuable in him, and yet they kept trying.
He let out a long, heavy sigh, burdened with a feeling just as heavy. His gaze, which until then had been fixed on the pillow sunken under the weight of his head, slowly drifted toward the cabin door.
Closed.
More than anything, he wished he could be important to someone.
But it was obvious that everyone hated him.
They hated who he was.
His presence.
His existence.
He did too.
He hated himself, carried that feeling inside him as if he had learned it before he ever learned how to breathe.
And even so, he wished someone would knock on the door.
That someone would help him figure out who he really was.
Every person who had passed through his life had changed him in some way: they made him smile, made him cry, broke him, and only half put him back together. But even after all of that, he still felt lost, empty, as if he had no shape of his own.
His name was 007n7.
But sometimes he wished he were Elliot.
Or maybe Chance.
Or anyone else. Anyone but himself.
He felt distant from himself, as if he were watching himself from the outside, unable to recognize who he was.
He didn’t understand who he really was, nor what he was supposed to be. He only knew that existing like this hurt too much.
He wished someone would rebuild him along the way, that they would take the broken pieces and arrange them into something that made sense. But he knew that for him, everything was already over.
He had already reached his lowest point: suicide. And now he was trapped in this endless purgatory, where he could do nothing but run and repair generators. An eternal, hollow cycle.
Anyone could do what he did. Anyone could take his place. Because he really contributed nothing.
Trying not to keep sinking into the void, he stretched an arm toward the nightstand beside his bed, blindly reaching for the glass of water sitting there.
He only wanted to quiet the hunger, to fool his body one more time.
But, as always, his clumsy fingers only managed to ruin everything. With one awkward movement, the glass fell to the floor.
The crash was heavy and sharp. The water did what water does and spread across the floor, mixing with the scattered shards of glass, glimmering under the dim light like something dangerous and fragile all at once.
And even then, he felt nothing.
He slowly pulled his arm back onto the bed, his eyes never leaving the mess he had made. He didn’t even bother cleaning it up. It wasn’t worth it. Nothing was.
His thoughts returned, as they always did, to himself.
His weight.
His hair.
His face.
His personality.
His identity.
He looked nothing like what he had once been. The acclaimed hacker, the destroyer of systems, was now just a depressed father who didn’t know when to shut up, nor how to look masculine, nor even how to be strong.
Everything about him seemed wrong, out of place, badly put together.
Sometimes he envied how easily other people could understand their gender. He envied all the men in the cabin for knowing, without doubt, that they were men. He envied Twotime, Chance, and Noob, because deep down they had managed to understand who they were and feel comfortable with it.
He especially hated Veronica. Because she wasn’t even human, and yet she could still identify with a gender.
He couldn’t.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt okay with himself.
He only knew that every day he woke up with the same weight in his chest, with the same feeling that he was living a life that didn’t belong to him.
Everything felt like too much now. Even the little things were overwhelming. The walls themselves seemed to mock him.
Finally, he got out of bed. He ignored the shards of glass crunching beneath his feet and walked over to the table, covered in an almost perfect mess, barely lit by the light from the window. He opened the drawer.
There it was.
The razor he used to cut his hair. To avoid looking like a girl. The one that helped him get rid of, strand by strand, of everything he couldn’t stand seeing in himself.
There it was again, ready to help him. But not to cut hair this time.
He hadn’t touched it in a while. He had been too drained even for that. But now he stared at it as if it could offer him some kind of escape. He brought the razor to his arm. This wouldn’t be pleasant. He wanted to suffer through the pain.
Even if he was afraid, he wanted to end it all.
He held it with a trembling hand.
It was the only solution.
The razor now drew lines across his skin. The slow, heavy ones were less deep than he wanted them to be. The fast, thoughtless ones drew a lot of blood but didn’t hurt.
It still wasn’t deep enough. Tears spilled from his eyes.
He dared to cut himself, but he was still afraid of death. He traced cuts over other cuts. Blood pooled. The stinging still wasn’t there. There was pain, but not nearly enough.
But still, nothing happened. Nothing changed.
He was still himself.
Still trapped inside his body.
Stroke after stroke, he couldn’t stop thinking the same things.
Would it have been inevitable for him to be a bad father to c00lkidd?
Would Noli still remember him with the same sweetness and affection that he still remembered them with?
The pain finally came.
But it brought no clarity.
It only brought the same emptiness as always.
The sweet, comforting emptiness that would never leave him.
He couldn’t keep acting like this, not after so many years. He couldn’t keep dragging around that broken version of himself from adolescence, as if he were still incapable of facing anything like an adult.
Like a real man.
He stayed still, staring at the mess, his breathing uneven. Then he grabbed a tissue and cleaned up what he could, more out of habit than necessity.
After a few seconds, he let out an empty smile.
“I guess tomorrow will be another day.”
He hadn’t managed it today either.