Work Text:
Remus sinks his teeth into the flesh between his left thumb and wrist and bites down hard, muffling a scream. The sound tears at his vocal chords anyway, shredding up his throat and stabbing a painful droning buzz into his ears.
“Sweetheart,” he hears beside him, a thousand miles away.
Remus rocks, grinding his teeth, feeling the indentations they’re leaving in his skin. Feeling the molten shocks of pain jolting up his arm from the pressure and lacerations both—like his morningstar, blunt force and sharp spines. He heaves out a desperate breath around his hand, then another, then another, choking and gasping. He must look revolting, lip curled back in a desperate snarl as he bites himself, his whole body shaking, his face a greasy mess of sweat and tears. He feels it all too much and so sharp and so vividly and so awful and it hurts and everything’s wrong—he wants to peel his skin off and tear the ligaments from his hands and shred his scalp apart and get the thundering pain and fuzzing overwhelm in his body to stop.
He grits down hard enough that his gums start to hurt with the strain. Pain stabs up to his elbow, and he tastes blood in his mouth. The brain is wired so you can’t bite your own finger off, he knows. You could do it to someone else’s, sure, but not your own. But maybe he’s that broken, that convoluted, that disgusting. Maybe he’s inhuman enough to actually do it.
His next few breaths come out as a series of choked sobs, tears blurring his vision. His chest burns. His eyes burn. It all hurts so much. The pain in his hand hurts but it’s his, it’s something he has control over, it’s something he can initiate, it’s different from the roiling discomfort beyond his control everywhere else and in everything else. It’s concentrated and it’s his and it feels like a siphon, draining out the overwhelm, or at least focusing it down to a certain sharp point. Small localized pain is manageable. This kind of pain he can deal with better.
“Remus, don’t.” Janus’s voice beside him is firm—low and serious. He’s sitting close, and Remus braces, but he doesn’t feel the familiar gloved hands place their awful-too-much-right-now-silky-fabric texture against his skin. Janus keeps his distance. He knows. “Remus, I need you to bite down on something else. Let go.”
His jaw feels petrified, locked in place—frozen by that rusty metal disease, because what about him isn’t diseased—but somehow Remus manages to make it twitch painfully, tearing his hand from its grasp. He shrieks, unmuffled now, screeching, screeching, hyperventilating—everything’s too much, he can’t take it, he needs to get it away, he needs to claw it out, he needs to bite something—
Something soft is placed into his hand, the one he’d just been biting, the one stinging with pain—and he jerks it to his mouth, bearing down into it before his mind can even catch up. It’s a cloth of some kind, maybe a folded towel. The texture against his teeth feels…okay, he supposes. Tethering.
It tastes like cotton, thick and dry against his tongue. Remus digs his teeth into it and rocks, rocks, breathing heavily through his nose. It’s the only thing he can breathe through enough with his mouth full, obstructed by the towel. He’s lucky he isn’t congested, or else he actually might asphyxiate.
Janus is still there, sitting beside him, but not touching. He knows better than to touch.
It makes Remus feel…warm, a little, somehow. A flicker of something that isn’t just the roiling agony in his chest.
The pressure of it all and the tautness of his throat makes him fight back a gag, all of a sudden. He pitches forward a little bit onto his knees. There’s nothing in his stomach to bring up, though, so it doesn’t feel too dangerous. It wouldn’t be the first time he and Janus would have to deal with vomit during one of his…episodes, anyway.
Remus shrieks again, once, twice, wordless and terrified, into the towel. More uncomfortable vibrations rattle through his jaw. His breath hitches, again and again and again, his shoulders trembling as he fights to regulate the air sputtering in and out of his lungs.
“Honey,” Janus coos, and his voice is soft and grounding. It’s something nice and good and gentle amidst the torrent of pain and overwhelm. “Honey, it’s all right. Let it happen; I’m right here with you. You’re not alone.”
Remus knows that, he knows that, but it’s nice to hear him say it, somehow. He groans out a sharp breath, his fingers spasming at the waves of pain and discomfort and self-loathing, at the desire to tear into his own skin. “Mmmmngh—”
Janus shushes him softly. “It’s going to be all right, dear heart.”
That’s a name he rarely uses, only when Remus is in a really low place. During one of these times. It had been for Virgil, too, but Remus can’t remember the last time he’d heard it for Virgil.
The memory stings.
Another wave of sobs constricts his lungs. He keels over so he’s resting with his head to the floor, half-collapsed, leaning up with his chest to his knees. The roaring in his head is too loud—alleviated a little with the biting, the shrieking, the outlets—the strain of his gums as he squeezes his jaw down as hard as he can—but it’s still too there, too loud.
He hates it. He hates everything. He hates everything but Janus and he hates himself and he just wants it to be soft, for once, for the things around him to be smooth and gentle and not sharp and abrasive like he is and for him to feel okay.
Everything is so wrong—everything is so far from okay right now.
Remus shrieks again, and the sound tapers off into pained, miserable whimpers. He claws at the towel with his hands, his breath hitching over and over. Beside him, Janus shifts, moving his weight a little from his own haunches to the floor. “Honey. Deep pressure?”
“Mmf,” Remus grunts out, desperate. Please. The switch has flipped.
Janus’s hands—two, four, six—meet his back, his shoulders, his wrists, careful to avoid the punctures against the skin of his left hand, gathering all of him up and pulling him close to his chest. It’s good, stabilizing, grounding. It makes him feel safe. Remus slumps into the embrace—the embraces?—and shudders with a sob, turning and burying his face into the crook of Janus’s neck.
He isn’t alone.
“Breathe, sweetheart, breathe,” Janus coaxes, rocking him slowly against his chest. “I’m right here with you. Slow breaths.”
Remus sobs harder. His jaw is starting to slacken with exhaustion, unable to keep up the intense pressure for so long. His hand is bleeding. His gums might be bleeding. He balls his fists tighter into the towel and lets it fall from his mouth, trailing strings of spit and mucus. It’s awful. He’s awful.
Janus’s arms squeeze him firmly, not too much to restrict airflow and make him feel claustrophobic but plenty enough to press the pain down and away. Remus lets the wrenching sobs tear up his throat, shuddering in the snake’s hold—he has no other choice. The exhaustion is starting to consume everything else; he’s in no state to keep fighting. He burrows his nose deeper into Janus’s neck and drinks in his familiar scent, apples and reptile and cologne, desperate to anchor himself to the world.
He sobs it out, and Janus lets him. Janus holds him and whispers quiet things and waits for him, letting him choke and gasp and try to rend the pain from his chest. And he does—and it works, a little, for now. Exhaustion rises up to wash it away, the relief brain chemicals from crying rise up to wash it away, the safety and comfort of being wrapped up in one of Janus’s full, deep embraces washes it away, and the world and his body start to settle into some level of tolerability. He’s left there hiccuping and gasping and sniffling in the quiet, feeling a little bit back to himself. Back to where occupying his own physical form doesn’t feel like a perpetual swim with electric eels, back to where the sensation of living in his skin and operating as a sentient nervous system piloting a meat mech—or as a psychological facet of one, maybe—isn’t the absolute worst, isn’t the bane of all existence.
Remus breathes. He breathes.
It’s easier now.
A calmer layer has settled, a gentle fuzz of exhaustion partitioning the space between him and the agonized hyperawareness of reality. He can observe from a bit of a distance, though the hitching of his lungs still hurts—though his hiccups and half-gags are a bit painful, leaving a vague stinging ache in his chest and his throat. They’ll probably be sore for a while. He can deal with that later.
“That’s it, that’s good, sweetie,” Janus praises, still cradling him close. He sways gently, the motion slow and calming, like waves of the ocean. Like the rise and fall of breathing. Like knowing someone else gets it, that someone else understands. “That’s good, dear love. I have you. You’re safe.”
You’re safe.
Remus coughs, the sharp burst of air further straining his throat. He might’ve spit up a little saliva, a little blood. He doesn’t really know. Janus had turned off the lights at some point, and his eyes are now used to it, but it’s still too dark to see very clearly. His vision is drifting, floating slowly in a gray-black haze.
He’s so tired.
“It’s all right, sweetie. You can rest.” Janus knows. He always knows. Janus tucks his head over Remus’s, slotting in around him like it’s where they belong. Remus can vaguely feel an exhalation of breath from his nose brushing against his hair, making the locks tremble. It’s…comforting, somehow. “That was a lot, wasn’t it? Just breathe, deep and slow.”
Remus does—he sags deeper into the serpent’s chest, gasping. He groans a low noise, still trying to process what it’s like in his body as he resettles, as he reacclimates with the blood and bone.
His breath hitches oddly, then, hiccuping gasps forced up his throat—once, twice, three times—and he stiffens as panic flutters through his chest. His lungs squeeze painfully, the burning stronger now. He can’t breathe, can’t get the air in—
“Shh, shh…” Janus isn’t thrown by it; he shifts back into troubleshooting without batting an eye. He slackens his embrace a little, giving Remus more room to breathe, and wraps gentle fingers around his uninjured hand. He raises it up to rest against his own sternum. “Follow my breathing. In, deep, slow…”
Janus sits with him, breathing, and guides him through it. Remus tries, he does; the air judders in and out of his chest uncontrollably for a little while, harsh and choppy and painful, but slowly the constricting spasms subside and he can fill his lungs smoothly enough again.
He can breathe. He’s back in control.
“Good, sweetheart, good. That’s it.” Janus’s voice is so soft.
Remus heaves a gasp, deep and trembling only a little. Janus lets him breathe for a minute, then unwinds a pair of arms from his back and lifts a thermos of water to his mouth. Remus sniffles, fighting to coordinate himself, trying to focus on the task; the process is slow and laborious, but he at least he doesn’t choke as he drinks. The water feels good against his throat.
Janus wipes his face with the towel, a part of it that he hadn’t been biting into, once Remus pulls away from the thermos. Another pair of hands attends to his injured thumb at the same time, unspooling a roll of gauze and starting to wrap it. Remus winces a little—the wound stings, his heartbeat throbbing around the irritated skin.
Janus ties off the bandage and returns his hand to the space between Remus’s shoulder blades. Remus sighs, heavy and bone-deep, settling back into the serpent’s chest. Janus shifts slightly to get into a better position, guiding them both to sit back against his bedpost. His fingers come up to scratch lazy patterns into the back of Remus’s neck, moving slowly up through the roots of his hair at his nape. They’re ungloved, all of a sudden, and he can feel the nails.
It feels really good. Remus shivers a little at the warm tingles that travel down his spine from the touch. He sighs again. The unbearable pressure and noise in his chest and his head and behind his eyes are gone, receded, leaked out with his screaming and biting and tears. There’s nothing left in him now, nothing left but exhaustion and the soft quiet and the momentary peace.
“Rest, sweetheart,” Janus urges, his words a low, humming rumble against Remus’s ear. “I’ve got you. I’ll be right here with you.”
Remus trusts him. He closes his eyes and rests.