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Sometimes, Gabe wishes he were dead.
He hates himself for it. Because he loves living, he truly does; he thrives off of the joys that life provides him, and he knows he’s lucky to get them.
But, God, is the pain unbearable.
The night stretches and twists painfully, just like the heart of his abdomen. He’s curled up in bed, much like a child would do, shivering in his grey sweats and hoodie. Every twitch burns, every shake sears.
In his blurred vision he can just about make out the red lines flashing on his clock. 03:06. Fuck. He can’t afford to keep missing out on sleep like this; truth be told, he’s been coiled up like a corpse for what feels like hours now, and, goddamnit, it shows in the hours where he’s supposed to be awake. He doesn’t eat breakfast and nobody seems to notice; Natalie is up to her ears in her schoolwork, all of the papers overflowing from her multiple AP classes, Dan is too busy talking on the phone to colleagues or hiding sharp utensils in the depths of cupboards or running errands or doing literally anything that means he isn’t paying attention to either of his children, and Mom is…well, Mom.
She’s too attentive when her head isn’t clouded. So much so that it makes Gabe aware of every minute move he makes, even when he’s feeling completely fine. On the rare days where the pain is easy to pass off as having slept in a weird position, or where the migraines can be put down to stress, or where the shakiness can be reduced to nerves about college admissions, where his posture isn’t perfect so he must be hunched over because of pain, where he walks a little slower than usual so he must be having some sort of medical emergency, where he doesn’t return all of the wrappers from the brown paper bag she (sometimes) prepares for him, so he must be taken straight to the emergency room because if he’s not eating then he has to be thinking that he’ll die if he does.
He hates the attention she provides when he’s fine because she doesn’t give it when he needs it, because when he’s not fine, she’s not fine, and she misses a lot.
How Gabe wishes they could gain a sixth sense and burst into his bedroom right now.
His right arm clutches his lower abdomen softly, frayed nails grazing the fabric of his sweater, catching on loose strands of cotton. With his left arm, he weakly grabs the comforter and pulls it up, even tighter to his neck, and it makes the fire in his body burn with more ferocity, which makes no fucking sense, because his arm does not, should not, dictate the movements of his gut.
He vaguely thinks of Natalie.
Natalie doesn’t know how lucky she is.
She’s probably fast asleep right now, dreaming happy dreams of Yale and Henry. And, if she is awake, it’s most likely of her own will; probably practicing piano with her headphones in or working through yet another problem set.
Oh, how Gabe wishes he could even have a chance of getting into some prestigious college like Yale. He’s passing but his brain does not deem it satisfactory; a 3.1 GPA, which is, like, so fucking unfair, because he does try, contrary to the majority of his teacher’s beliefs. He wants to scream at them that he does study, he does put the effort in, but only when he’s not doubled over on a hard tiled floor, fighting to keep his eyes open.
They’re threatening to kick him off the football team if he doesn’t improve his grades.
He’s starting to think that’s not such a bad thing.
Some captain he is.
He can barely make it out onto the pitch most days of the week.
How Gabe wishes his dreams could be filled with a pretty boy, with whom he’d sneak kisses between classes or behind the bleachers. They’d give each other flowers just because. Gabe would let him touch him with passion and care, but not care because if he presses too hard he’ll shatter him, no, with care because that’s what you should do.
He sees the boy in passing periods sometimes. He sits behind him in classes and listens to him sing in the practice rooms when he thinks no one can hear him.
But those visions will have to remain in his fantasies.
Instead, his nightmares are plagued with flying car rides in the dead of night, laying on the uncomfortable hospital beds as he screams and writhes and cries to whoever’s up there to save him, to make it stop. The vague faces and figures of Dan and Natalie standing over him, expressions etched with concern. He doesn’t get visitors other than that; Mom can’t handle hospitals, people at school can’t handle him, and the boy doesn’t know he exists.
Fire stabs his stomach, and Gabe groans softly, digging his teeth into his scarred gums - from all the times before - to muffle the sound.
His eyes burn as he squints at the clock. 03:07.
How has it only been a minute?
His stomach tightens in a way that’s got nothing to do with the curse put upon him in infancy.
He needs to sleep.
But worrying about lack of sleep often leads to further lack of sleep.
Especially when coupled with this.
He needs to be awake in three hours.
He’d fallen asleep at midnight.
Woken up at one.
He can’t tell neither Mom nor Dan about it.
They’ll force him to go someplace else, somewhere he can’t bear to name.
The two conflicting sides often pull at his brain and taunt him.
Wake up his parents. Get their attention. Get them to look at him, because he’s in trouble and he needs them.
Don’t wake them up. They’re too overbearing and they’ll overreact and, even when he’s desperate for it, he can’t handle their worrying.
Oftentimes he finds himself calling for them, and then regretting it immediately after.
School.
The word hangs over his head. The thought persists.
He’ll flunk out if he doesn’t sort himself out.
Fuck, he needs to get a grip.
So, with extreme trepidation and slowness, Gabe lifts the comforter up and away from his shivering body. The movement sends sparks through his entire abdomen, and Gabe stabs his incisors into his bottom lip, corners of his teeth jutting into the frayed flesh. His breath catches in his throat as he sits up, inch by inch, the minutes passing by agonisingly slow.
He lets his right arm drop to the mattress, exposing his clothed abdomen to the room. Somehow, it hurts more when he doesn’t have it there, which is stupid, because it was never doing anything in the first place.
Shit.
Okay.
Gabe takes a deep breath.
Braces himself.
He swings his legs over the edge of the bed and resists the urge to cry out.
His vision blurs again, but not because of the tears like hours before.
His toes graze the floor. The cold, hard floor.
Dan had said years before that they’d replace the wood with carpet, to cushion the impact of Gabe’s juvenile body giving up on him.
Clearly, he’d gotten too busy.
Digging his whitening knuckles into the hard mattress, Gabe pushes himself up. The stretch punches him, right in the centre of his stomach. Again. And again. And again.
Again and again and again until he stands up properly, lifts his fists from the bed, and trips forwards, sweaty palms slamming into the doorframe in front.
The impact doesn’t hurt his hands.
It attacks his abdomen and nearly sends him right back down again.
“Fuck,” Gabe whispers to himself, quiet syllables reverberating from the blue walls. “Come on. You can do this.”
He inches over to his bedroom door, his right hand still gripping onto the frame for dear life. The soles of his feet barely graze the floor as his left hand grips the doorknob. His body sears as he twists it, the hinges screaming with a deafening creak. He pushes it open just enough to make a gap that he can hobble through.
His hands never leave the walls. He grips back onto the white painted hall with his left hand, right hand trailing across the wooden door. Somehow he manages to gather up the willpower to close it shut right behind him.
If Mom or Dan wake up, they’ll think he’s just asleep.
They don’t question what’s behind closed doors.
From the end of the hall, the light from the kitchen below gleams up at him. It’s calling him, beckoning him.
The strong pills are down there, hidden in the back of a cupboard, behind various other orange bottles.
The ones that can knock him out and rid him of this torture.
They’re hidden so far. He can’t fathom why Dan does it; if Mom were to be interested in morphine, they would know it by now. The Xanax and Ativan and Prozac and Valium are more her thing.
Maybe he just likes to believe that his son will never need it.
He likes lying to himself like that.
When he finally, finally, reaches the top of the staircase, the white lights from both pain and the kitchen blinding him, Gabe flicks his eyes up.
Their bedroom door is right in front of him.
How easy it would be to knock. To scream like he did as a little boy, to have them come running.
But he can do this himself.
This is something he has to do himself.
College is right around the corner. There’s no calling for mommy then.
His slick hands shake and make a slapping sound as they meet the banister.
His body is on fire, the petroleum of pain dousing his fragile, fucked up organs.
Gabe inches a leg forward.
His intestine slashes open.
“Come on,” he murmurs, voice quivering, “don’t be stupid.”
How stupid it is, to be in pain. When he’s nearly eighteen and doesn’t remember the last time there was a day void of it.
With excruciating lethargy, Gabe lowers himself down onto the first step. His fingers slide down from the banister to the rails keeping it from falling, as he can’t help but crouch down from his hunch. It ebbs the pain ever so slightly, before it returns right back worse than before.
He quickly finds he has to have both feet on the same step at the same time. Like a toddler.
He gets about halfway down before a fresh wave of torment drowns his body, and his knees give up. And then he’s on his ass, on his side, and he’s having to slide down the stairs, the pads of his fingers coming away from each rail and hitting the successive one softly, and it’s sort of comfortable when his hips or thighs or shoulders aren’t hitting the wooden steps, but then when he reaches the next one his body slams into them again and the pain just comes back worse, more unbearable, more paralysing, and this is so fucking embarrassing and he can’t take much more of this for much longer, he wants to scream, he wants to cry, he wants to die, he wishes the ground could swallow him up whole right here right now so he could stop hurting, he wishes he could-
He’s at the bottom of the stairs.
Both hands grip onto the thick support of the banister, a weird change from the thinner rails.
Upon being sprawled out at the threshold of the kitchen, Gabe now realises why the light is on in the fucking first place, something he hadn’t thought to question before.
Natalie’s sitting at the island in the centre of the kitchen.
With her head in her hands and a disgusting amount of worksheets and ring binders staring up at her.
What the fuck?
Why is she here, of all places in the house to do homework, in the middle of the night?
The mere idea of the mortification Gabe will face if she turns her head to see him looking so pathetic gives him the motivation to pull himself upright.
He pushes his hands down on the banister, swallowing down the scream that’s crawling up his sore throat as his abdomen stretches out once again. He attempts to look casual.
“What are you doing up?” he manages to croak.
He sounds anything but casual.
Natalie jumps so hard that Gabe can see her messy bun nearly unravel itself from on top of her head. Her eyes are wide and slightly red.
It’s colder down here than it was upstairs.
Gabe feels his arms prickle.
“What- what are you doing up?” she whisper-hisses back, closing a purple binder.
“Water,” Gabe lies.
He can feel his knees giving up on him again.
“Okay,” Natalie says softly, drawing out the word with skepticism.
Fuck, she knows him too well.
“What are you working on?” he asks.
Ask her a question about academics and she’s sure to turn her head right back to it.
Sure enough, she does, giving Gabe the chance to awkwardly slide off the final step onto the floor.
It really is cold, yet his palms continue to sweat.
“Calculus.”
“Right. Cool.” His voice is strained as he begins to walk, and very quickly comes to the realisation that he has nothing to hold onto.
Another problem creeping into his mind is how exactly he’s going to get his fix without his sister noticing. Because when she notices, she’ll ask questions, and she’ll probably run off to get Mom.
Gabe can’t deal with that.
She’s talking about integrals, and he’s trying to craft a way in his head to get her to leave the room for at least a minute, when the fire inside him suddenly becomes too unbearable. He stumbles forward, gripping tight onto the counter edge which is, conveniently, right in front of him.
Unconveniently, however, it’s right under Natalie’s nose.
“Are you okay?” he hears her say, panicked, as his face burns with shame.
She wasn’t supposed to see this.
Nobody was.
“Fine.” Gabe attempts to laugh but it just hurts, everything hurts. “Just slipped on one of your- oh, fuck.”
Nope, there’s really no hiding it now, especially as he can no longer form the ability to speak a coherent sentence without doubling over in pain. His knees finally give way and they smack to the floor, and the same hand from before shoots to caress his stomach.
Fuck, Gabe wishes this floor would open up and let him fall through.
“Okay.” The legs of the stool screams against the floor. “Okay. You’re okay.”
She sounds like she’s trying to convince herself.
“Hey.” Her voice is close but sounds distant. It’s really fucking cold. “Hey. Gabe. Look at me.”
Gabe flicks his eyes up. Natalie’s now on the floor, crouching in front of him, eyes wide with terror. She’s only wearing shorts and a t-shirt. How is she not cold?
He feels his bottom jaw twitch, his rows of teeth clattering against each other.
He lets his other hand drop to the floor. He looks like a baby, on his hands and knees on the floor like this.
He hates himself.
“Is it your stomach?” Natalie murmurs.
“Of course it is.” He shifts onto his side, unable to bear the humiliation of looking and feeling like an infant for much longer. He lets out a strangled gasp; when he moves, the pain moves with him. “Always- always my fucking stomach…”
His voice trails off into nothingness, the later syllables merging together.
He’s shaking again.
“Okay.” Gabe really wishes she’d stop saying that word. He keeps his eyes fixated on the same spot as she begins to rise up. “Okay, I’ll- I’ll go and get Mom-”
“No,” he snaps. He reaches out to her, his hand on her knee. It’s too fast, too sudden, and he lets out a cry. His eyes burn, his face burns, his body burns. “No, Nat, don’t- don’t get her-”
“Gabe, I-”
“She’s- she’s-” The words aren’t coming to him. Why aren’t the words coming to him? “You know…”
Natalie pauses for a second. Her voice is hesitant and - if Gabe isn’t mistaken - shaking slightly. “What about Dad?”
“He doesn’t-” He cuts himself off with a cry as his wretched body twists in on itself relentlessly. “He d-doesn’t know.”
“Know what?”
“T-to do-”
“Gabe, I don’t know what to do,” Natalie protests, but Gabe watches in his peripheral vision as she sinks back down to meet his gaze again.
There’s a strange sensation sneaking into his skull, one that seldom comes in times like these. That cloudy one, the one that makes him feel like he’s not here.
He grips onto his sister’s knee tighter.
She’s here. He’s sure of that.
So is the pain.
It’s not giving up tonight.
He’s searching for the word in his foggy mind, but he can’t retrieve it. He’s aware of the way Natalie is looking at him, and it reminds him of exactly why he hates the attention.
“Came for the Valium,” he slurs, as his teeth smash into each other.
“Huh?” She sounds genuinely confused.
“Valium.” He’s sure that’s the word. Sounds familiar, anyway. “Mine.”
“Gabe, you don’t take Valium.”
What? No. He’s sure he does. He can envision it in his hand, the small blue capsule.
“Sure I do.”
“You- no, that- that’s not yours,” Natalie says softly, and before Gabe can ask who the fuck takes Valium in this place, she continues with, “Do you mean morphine?”
Well, that’s a word he’s never heard of.
He continues to shake, continues to writhe, continues to sweat, continues to try his best to keep his eyes open.
“Hm?”
“The pills you normally take. The…” She trails off, suddenly sounding concerned. “Gabe. Look at me.”
He flicks his eyes up. Fuck, even that hurts.
Everything hurts.
He remains on his side, trying to persuade the cold floor to balance out his blazing interior.
His eyes flick shut.
“No, Gabriel, come on. Please.”
He wishes he could tell her how much he can’t.
Something very cold presses itself against his forehead. It feels like the floor but it can’t be, because his side is on the floor, not his head…
“You’re burning up,” Natalie murmurs.
Gabe feels his eyebrows furrow instinctively.
“‘M cold,” he mumbles.
“You’re not,” she counters. “You feel cold?”
“Freezing.”
Natalie is silent for a moment. Gabe inches onto his side more, hand slipping from his sister’s knee onto the floor.
“You need to cool down,” she says eventually, and her voice is so soft, so comforting, like a hug, but Gabe can’t understand why she’s saying what she’s saying.
Why does he need to cool down if he’s so cold?
“Don’t,” he protests weakly.
She doesn’t appear to be listening, as he feels her hand inside his zip-up, by his shoulder, near the hood. She starts to pull it down his arm and he shifts without thinking, but when he shifts, his body sears with a reminder of how fucked up he is.
“No,” he cries, “no, don’t, Nat, it hurts, Nat it hurts, please please-”
“Okay. Oh, God, I’m sorry, Gabe.” She lets go of him immediately.
His head flops down into her lap.
He wants to tell her it’s okay, but heaving his chest to breathe is too much. Speech is impossible. The mere thought of forming words hurts.
“Can I roll your sleeves up instead?” she whispers.
Gabe wants to tell her no.
Because he’s freezing, he’s shivering, can’t she see?
But he just hums.
Natalie appears to take that as a yes. She hooks her thumb inside his soft sleeve, pulling it up his quivering arm until it reaches his elbow.
He doesn’t need to look to know his skin is littered with goosebumps.
Cold.
Hot.
Nothing’s real.
He misses his life.
The one he could’ve had.
Where he's sleeping, preparing for his huge day, to go to jazz band early in the morning, to go to class with his 4.0 GPA, where everyone talks to him and laughs at his jokes because he is so loved, goddamnit, and then after that he’ll go to key club, and then after that he’ll lead his football team, who also cherish him, both for his personality and for his outstanding leadership skills. It’s hard, but it’s worth it, because he’s going to Harvard, folks, and he’s going to make it to the top. And to alleviate the stress, he sneaks kisses and gifts in between his classes and clubs with the boy, with his boy.
He can only fantasise.
He is forced to face the reality where he shivers for what feels like hours on the kitchen floor with his little sister, who holds him like a baby, whilst the aftershocks of his episode kick in. As the pain slowly, slowly, fades away, but by the time he is mobile once more, there is no time for sleep.
Just another day.