Work Text:
When the clock strikes twelve, Gabe feels nothing.
Except for what’s been there for what feels like forever.
Pain.
His eyes, narrow, welled up slits, bore into the clock on his nightstand. It’s a miracle he can even make out the numbers, what with all the other shit thrown alongside it: pill bottles, pill boxes, empty glasses, damp flannels, his glasses that he never, ever wears.
When he’d been younger, he’d imagined adulthood to be full of all the things he now knows it isn’t; driving in the sunset with his large group of friends who he loves and they all love him back, partying late into the night, being carried on the shoulders of the other guys in the football team after winning the game, playing pranks on his sister (all of which she finds hilarious), staying up late without consequences.
Not this.
He whimpers softly into the darkness of his bedroom as agony overtakes him once more.
His phone lies discarded on the mattress next to him. Even just inching his hand out to clutch it in his shaking grip kills. Sniffing, he twitches his thumb upwards, revealing the notification centre.
The empty notification centre.
There are no friends sending him long paragraphs of adoration and appreciation. There are no members of the football team tagging him in large group selfies wishing him the best.
There is a sister, but she isn’t speaking to him.
She locks herself in her bedroom and slams her fingers so hard on her piano keys that Gabe is surprised her hands aren’t shattered. She’s not wearing her headphones tonight, so the sound of Mozart bellows through the walls, worsening his already pounding migraine.
Even if he had the energy to get up and tell her to keep it down, he wouldn’t.
He never does.
God knows she needs the practice more than he can ever imagine.
Yale will not accept semi-perfected work.
Still, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.
He begins to feel the sweat beading on his hairline, even though it’s mid February. The slickness of his clammy hands causes another surge of nausea to come rushing through him, paralysing him, as his throat burns thanks to the acid creeping up, and his phone slides out of his hold. His insides twist and turn and seize and burn him from the inside out, so much so that the familiar dots start creeping in from the edges of his vision, spreading all over the room, bringing an unwelcome light to the darkness.
He feels the pain deep, right in the heart of his soul, in a way that makes him twitch inwards, an involuntary response that fucks him up even worse. Mouth close to his comforter, it muffles the cry that escapes from his chapped lips, as a lone tear trickles down from his eye, down the side of his face, to his jawline, to his neck, to sink into the neckline of his t-shirt, where it’s absorbed, eradicating all evidence of his pain.
Gabe’s not really sure whether it’s a conscious decision or not, to shut his eyes.
Either way, he doesn’t mind.
As he slips away from reality, so does the pain.
He forgets about it when he wakes up four hours later.
Stupid, really, because he can’t recall the last day where he’d woken up and not felt anything.
He sits up, too fast, too careless, too rash, and the consequences paralyse him immediately.
“Fuck,” he murmurs between clenched teeth, as the fire comes back, setting his organs alight.
There’s a dull ache behind his temples.
Gabe brings his hands up to his head, leaning forward, trying to push some of the pressure into his palms, a pathetic attempt of alleviating the war in his muscles.
At least Mozart has fucked off now.
But there’s shuffling downstairs; loud, annoying, incessant shuffling that adds to the battle in Gabe’s brain. The floorboards scream and cupboards collide and there are low, frantic voices, mixing together, creating an orchestra of agony that only adds fuel to the fire.
Pills.
Gabe needs pills.
Moving his head will probably knock him right out again.
Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.
He pushes that thought away.
He leans back to blindly search for the pills on his nightstand, the sudden stretching of his abdomen causing his intestines to coil. He lets out a strangled gasp, a mix of a sharp intake of breath and a cry, but he tries to push it back, tries to ignore it, because relief is coming. He knows it is.
Eventually, his shaking hand clasps around a rectangular box. His morphine.
It’s his favourite; it usually does the trick, but, fuck, is it risky.
The doctors tell him not to take it if he’s got an obstruction, but the line between the pain of a flare up and an actual emergency is so thin that Gabe always just goes for it anyway.
Nothing’s ever happened.
He brings the box closer to his lap, fumbling with his other hand to flip it open, to reach inside, to grab the sheet and-
Gabe freezes.
The box is empty.
“No,” he whispers, “no, no, no…”
His hand hits the top. And then the bottom. Just to be sure.
Nothing.
That makes no fucking sense.
There was one sheet left in there. He knows there was.
Something hits him then. A realisation that punches him right in his gut, making him double over once more.
“Fuck,” he whispers, as the idea begins to bloom and spiral in his head.
“Fuck,” he murmurs, as panic overrides pain, and he swings himself out of bed.
“Fuck,” he says, too loudly for the middle of the night, as the agony stabs him.
Still bent at an angle that would be uncomfortable for anyone not in pain, Gabe limps to his bedroom door, wrenching it open with a slightly larger amount of force than necessary.
The voices from downstairs become louder, floating up the stairs, as Gabe hobbles into the hallway. The two short steps to his sister’s bedroom feel like two mountains climbed.
Heart racing, palm sweating, he clutches the handle of her bedroom door, and gently pushes it open.
Her bed is empty.
Made, as always, but still empty.
With as much stealth as possible (which proves slightly difficult when you’re actively fighting the urge to collapse to the floor), Gabe enters her bedroom.
Lo and behold, he finds it.
On her own nightstand.
The pills.
His pills.
He snatches the sheet up and scans it in the darkness.
There aren’t any missing.
Thank fuck.
By the time Gabe returns to his bedroom, he has no time to pop one or two or three into his mouth before he collapses onto the cold, hard floor.
He skips breakfast.
He can’t handle that today.
Being eighteen feels no different from being seventeen or fifteen or twelve or four, a fact that is slowly settling in as Gabe walks into jazz band late.
Well.
Walks isn’t quite the right word.
More like stumbles.
The only thing stopping him from falling right into the people holding their saxophones is his iron grip on the door handle.
As he mumbles some pathetic apology that no one will pay attention to, Gabe realises that nothing changes.
He’s still the same person from yesterday. Still the same fucked up, invisible boy.
He’s not even sitting down at his drum kit when they start playing. He’s still trying to set his backpack down on the floor in a way that won’t make him keel over.
An elementary or middle school Gabe - heck, even freshman year Gabe - would’ve been trying his hardest to hold back the tears at this lack of contact. He’d have wanted to scream, to shout, “Look at me!”, to even get someone to glance in his direction.
As much as he knows Natalie likes to deny it, Gabe does know what isolation feels like.
Of course, hers is different, and he knows it is, because he sees it every fucking day, but he really does try his best to make her feel seen.
Clearly, it hasn’t been working.
“Yeah, well, you failed.”
The words make him feel sick every time he remembers them.
It’s been two weeks since his sister had first proclaimed her hatred towards him, and a week since she’d hurt him in such a way that had rendered him paralysed on the couch for two hours, and it doesn’t hurt any less.
He knows it’s his fault she’s so fucking angry at everything and everyone.
Unfortunately, he can’t fix what’s fucked up.
He can’t fix himself.
By the time Gabe twists himself into his seat in a way keeps the internal contortion at bay, and picks up his drumsticks, the first run through of the song is already over.
He sighs to himself.
It’s better without him playing in the background.
His first period is math, and, clearly, being an adult does not make Gabe any more capable at dealing with numbers.
Not in this sense, anyway.
He’s had years of practice of reading milligrams in fine print and counting capsules in his calloused, capped hands and memorising emergency numbers.
But algebra?
Fuck, no.
Whoever decided that letters belonged alongside numbers was a fucking idiot.
Under the desk, Gabe retrieves his phone from his pocket.
He turns it on.
Swipes up.
No Older Notifications
Great.
Suddenly, his stomach sears.
Gabe can’t tell whether it’s pain or hunger.
They’re too similar.
The day drags - slow, aching, agonising.
Like the dull pain building up above his hip, made worse with every step he takes in his passing periods.
He spends all of third period Phys Ed tactically avoiding his football coach.
At least he can do that right.
Gabe’s first meal of adulthood is a single pill of Vydura.
He places it under his tongue and curls up in the corner of the bathroom stall, the grime on the floor seeping through his pants. The buzzing of the strip of fluorescent white light above him is doing nothing to ease the scattered pinpricks of pain piercing his skull.
His head thuds against the stall door.
In the back of his buzzing brain, he debates calling Mom.
It takes a while for him to realise how bad of an idea that is.
So, instead, he begins to wait.
Wait for the pill to dissolve and work its magic.
The long, torturous wait.
Gabe feels his eyes flutter shut, and this time he knows it’s not a conscious choice.
His belongings are still strewn over his desk in Lit.
With his luck, it’ll be Natalie’s class in there later that he’ll have to walk into to get them back.
But he can’t find it in him to care, as the pain takes him hostage and leaves him limp in a high school bathroom stall.
Natalie doesn’t look at him when he awkwardly shuffles into her class two hours later.
He sits alone, in a messy, dark corner of the cafeteria, toying with an apple in his shaking hands.
He observes.
He’s good at that.
He kicks at the trash under the table by his feet and scans his surroundings.
They never change. The same people sit at the same seats at the same time each day, having the same meaningless conversations.
Even this table is made to seat twelve, without failure, every single day, Gabe is left to fend for himself.
The incessant chatter surrounding him from almost every angle does nothing except ignite the headache that had finally started fading away twenty minutes ago. Just like the bathroom, the bright lights don’t help, either.
His phone is still silent.
He keeps checking it just to look busy, to make it look like he actually has something going on.
Right now, it’s sat on the table, void of any life, staring up at him, mocking him with its emptiness.
Then, in the corner of the cafeteria, Gabe spots them.
Natalie and Henry.
Henry eats and talks and laughs and jokes like he’s not encouraging Natalie to do stupid amounts of drugs.
Natalie eats and talks and laughs and jokes like she didn’t steal her brother’s drugs last night.
Still, Gabe watches them with envy.
Because, whilst they are both undeniably fucked up, at least they can be fucked up together.
Despite himself, Gabe taps his phone screen again.
Nothing.
The minutes of freedom from classes drag.
And drag.
Despite it being early spring, the science lab is hot.
Too hot.
Gabe’s hands are so clammy and shaky that he can barely hold his pen properly.
His eyes bore into his worksheet on equilibrium, as the heat makes his face shine and causes his legs to bounce erratically.
The headache lingers, but he can push past it. Almost.
Something’s crawling up his throat.
It’s torturously ticklish, poking at the edges of his esophagus as it becomes more rapid, more demanding, more intense.
The room is deathly silent. There are a few odd, scattered whispers, and his teacher is typing with unnecessary speed, and the wind is howling slightly outside, but all of it combined is not enough to mask the sound that is undoubtedly about to come out of Gabe’s mouth.
Against his will, he coughs.
A horrible, nasty, sickening, disgusting, crunching sound that rips through the classroom.
No one turns their heads around to look; Gabe supposes that they know where the noise comes from by now, and they clearly, really couldn’t care less. Nobody notices when he slowly pulls his hand back, only to be met with a small puddle of crimson, the liquid mingling and staining the intricacies of his skin. A string of bloodied spit connects his palm and lips together.
His stomach twinges.
He glances around, gaze flicking from one side of the room to the other, left, right, left, right, so quickly that it sends a sharp, sudden ache in the corner of each eye.
No one’s looking.
He sits in the back row, closest to the door. Theoretically, he could sneak out and go to the bathroom, but he’s done that once today already, and he’s sat on enough grimy floors with unidentified substances for one day.
So, he licks his lips.
Swallows thickly, the metallic taste burning his throat.
Wipes his shaking hand on the leg of his pants, smearing watery blood across the denim.
And focuses on his worksheet once again.
Key club is cancelled.
Gabe is secretly glad.
He doesn’t go to football practice.
Nobody needs to know that he quit.
For a day that is supposed to be celebrating being alive, Gabe has never felt more lifeless.
When he stumbles over the threshold that afternoon, he’s surprised to find that the house is quiet. Empty.
It’s expected that Dan isn’t here; no, he spends as much time as possible at work.
It’s also expected that Natalie isn’t here; even if they were speaking, at this time she’d still be upstairs, breaking her fingernails or sobbing over physics.
Or, doing drugs, apparently.
Gabe had made sure to hide all the bottles and packets before leaving the house this morning.
On the other hand, Mom not being here is…strange.
A feeling of unease settles in Gabe’s gut, alongside everything else that burns and punches and stabs and twists and tortures.
He passes out the second he hits the couch, the straps of his backpack sliding down his arms.
When he wakes up hours later, dazed and sweaty, the entire downstairs is dark. The confusion renders Gabe panicked, and he sits up quick, too quick, and the dizziness hits him at once.
“Shit,” he whispers.
His hands fly to his pockets, tapping them, feeling for the cursed, lifeless rectangle. He pulls it out and swipes up, anyway.
Nothing.
What the fuck?
His eyes glance up to the time.
21:04
The silence of the house is tense in a way that it normally isn’t.
Gabe can’t even hear Mozart.
He can’t hear Dan on the phone to his colleagues.
He can’t hear Mom taking pill after pill or throwing something across the room or shouting or watching the usual crap she watches on TV.
For the second time today, he debates calling Mom.
Once again, he realises how bad of an idea that is.
Above the time on his screen, his eyes land on the date.
Oh.
Yeah.
It’s his birthday today.
The biggest birthday of his life so far, with no balloons or cake or presents or…anything.
Something hot and uncomfortable washes over him.
This is how Natalie feels.
Every fucking day.
Sure, he’d been able to sympathise with her loneliness countless times over the years but not…not like this, never like this.
The sudden urge to talk to her hits him.
He suddenly realises how much he misses his little sister.
Slowly - so he doesn’t pass out again - Gabe rises from the couch. In the darkness, he finds his way to the staircase, feeling for each step with his foot.
The entire house is dark.
Not even the hall light is on.
When Gabe reaches Natalie’s bedroom door, he feels his eyes widen when there’s no light spilling from the tiny slit between the wood and the floor.
Heart racing, head pounding, stomach twisting, Gabe knocks on her door gently.
“Nat,” he says softly.
Nothing.
“Hey,” he says, a little louder. “Natalie.”
Nothing.
Gabe sighs.
She’s probably just ignoring him.
Still, the buzzing urge to just sit down and fucking communicate isn’t leaving his soul.
He gently opens the door.
Scans the room.
She’s not there.
The only evidence of her previous presence is her bedroom window, wide open.
Gabe sighs again, more out of sorrow than anything now.
He’s just glad his pills are tucked away, safe from her desperate hands.
The night stretches over into morning, and when the clock strikes twelve, Gabe is forced to accept that his birthday is an event long forgotten.
It’s three thirty in the morning when life finally enters the house again.
Gabe isn’t asleep - because why would he be? - but he is sitting in bed. Bolt upright, one earphone jammed in his ear, the other dangling down his chest.
The front door creaks open. There’s voices. Shuffling.
It’s Natalie.
It has to be.
Fuck, what if she’s fucked up again?
Without thinking, Gabe rips his earphone out. Tosses his phone aside and gets out of bed, throwing the comforter back, with so much speed, too much speed, that he doesn’t even register the pain and lightheadedness until he’s already at the bottom of the stairs.
It’s not Natalie.
Which, on the one hand, is a good thing; it means he doesn’t have to deal with her whilst she’s stoned, and doesn’t have to hear more high words of honesty about how much she hates him and Mom and Dan and everyone and everything apart from Henry and her precious pills.
But, that’s also bad. Really fucking bad.
Normally, she wakes up at ridiculously early hours of the morning, not too far from now.
She’s still gone.
Gabe doesn’t even have time to dwell on that, because Mom’s here, and something’s illuminating the darkness.
Candles.
The base of them are being covered by her hand, but they’re candles alright.
“Diana.”
That’s Dan. Gabe can make out his silhouette in the frame of the front door.
“I know you’re excited,” Mom says, as if Dan’s not talking to her, “but don’t run down the stairs, sweetie. You don’t want to hurt yourself, especially not on your big day.”
Gripping onto the banister, cold confusion settles in Gabe’s stomach.
“Mom?” he whispers, too soft, too unsure of itself.
“Shh,” Mom hums back.
She takes her hand away.
Realisation trickles in as Gabe takes in what’s in front of him.
Two candles.
1
8
Fuck.
Dan’s snapping “Diana” at the same time Gabe’s murmuring and stuttering “Mom, I- I…”
“Dan, stop,” Mom laughs, as if Dan’s ruining a moment. “It’s his birthday.”
Gabe swallows thickly.
Tries not to let his eyes water.
Tries not to vomit from guilt.
He understands Natalie now.
Truly.
But he can’t do anything about it now, can he?
Because she’s fucking her mind up in a club because of him, isn’t she?
So, all he can do is whisper, “Thank you, Mom.”
He leans forward and blows the candles out.