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The desire for touch does not respond to logic. It cannot be negotiated with. It can be placated in unconsciousness, and to some extent while lucid, but sooner or later one finds oneself dry heaving into a pillow over wanting a hug, which is just unbelievably embarrassing. He's thirty-nine for pete's sake.
If Grace were more self-aware, he would realize that this is a point of pride; the way he does not want things. He knows his baser desires- to sleep, to eat, to not die alone somewhere cold and dark, but the more complex and emotional wants he remains distantly aware of, like a tickle in the back of the throat that threatens to turn into a raging cold. If he does not look at it, at least at any other time besides the weeping, foolish hours of the early morning, it does not have to be. Marissa told him this once, when he was flirting with a panic attack over a lab report that was refusing to organize itself into navigable data: "Never trust how you feel about your life past nine pm". And so he doesn't. Extraneous information. Useless data. Don't even worry about it, man.
Except for the part where it's seven pm and he's too tired to stay up any longer, and the pit in his stomach could be from slow drip of starvation that might just let him survive these next couple of years, or it could be from the fact that the last time a real live anything put their hands on him was to jam a needle in his neck. He hasn't gone to bed before nine-thirty since what, middle school? Even before that? And sure, malnutrition and the rippling encroachment of post-traumatic stress disorder is a pretty big energy sink, but this is just bleak.
Grace adds it to the pile of "things to roll eyes about since nothing else can be freaking done about it", and adjusts his grip on the insides of his shoulder blades.
He's not inhuman; he wants to be held. He understands the concept of self-soothing delusions and thinks, sometimes and with no small amount of internal disdain, of being cradled in arms and told plainly and simply the many things that happened to him that were terrible and wrong. He wants someone to be sorry for what was done, not only to get him in this situation in the first place but further back than that, when he was a small child who had not yet devised a way to stop setting himself up for disappointment. The part of himself that remains a teacher tries to look back with compassion, to acknowledge that the way he asked for things is the way it should always be. He tried to make a world like that for his kids. When they asked why this or that thing was true or necessary, he tried to tell them. He didn't give out meaningless homework.
The part that has survived to adulthood is harder to manage. It sneers at how he was; how he showed up at the doorway of a darkened bedroom and expected to be soothed. You idiot. You stupid child. What did you expect? When will you learn? How soon until we can rid ourselves of the desire to ask to be held tight against the world and loved?
Never trust how you feel about life after nine pm, and absolutely positively do not get self-reflective after two and a half years of touch starvation. That's a little truism for the day right there.
He knows he cannot have what he wants and so he sours the grapes; he makes his stomach turn at the thought of a hand pressed gently and warm between his shoulder blades. He tosses and turns through the night, wracked with cravings that are physically impossible to fill, and scolds the child that keeps him awake. Stop it, he thinks, sweating and cranky and bleary-eyed, stop it, good grief. Ugh. We're better than this. Come on, man.
Which of course is the terrible truth: that he is no better than any other animal. His body longs for warmth. It wants to be touched. He wants, piercing through the repulsion like a cheap flashlight through haze, for his desperation to be seen and attended to. Anticipatory mortification with none of the catharsis.
You can put a six-syllable word to it, but it doesn't make it any easier.
At least he knows he isn't dead. He cannot be dead if the hunger hits this hard. He is alive, by his own hard work and a tremendous amount of luck, and his reward for this is to starve in his body in a multitude of ways. His continued existence is kind of a fudging miracle, and he pays in shame. He is alive in a constant state of embarrassment for the things that he wants by virtue of being a living being. Ryland Grace is just another animal, curled shivering with its tail around it for warmth.
It's not dissimilar to what he's got going on now- knees pulled up to his chest and head tucked down towards his sternum, arms wrapped around his body in a one-man embrace to grip the jutting insides of his shoulder blades and press into the space between deteriorating bone and milk-pale skin. He can't hold the grip for very long without it slipping, but he readjusts every time. Eventually, he will fall asleep and wake up with a crick in his neck, but at least he'll have slept.
The difficult thing about delusions is that you get to make them perfect. Dreams, you have no control over. He's tried lucid dreaming; it's a pretty cool concept that anyone of a certain level of combined intelligence and arrogance thinks they can sort of lock into. It never worked. Self-soothing delusions, however, are both fantastic and dangerous because you can, in fact, perfect them.
Grace has the beats of his favorite one down to the millisecond. He's being embraced from the front, pressed tightly against a warm body- a body that, if he continues this streak of honesty, is the same one currently humming at a gentle 700Hz above him in an ultimately futile but genuinely admirable attempt at soothing the leaking, weeping human below, with a hand carding gently through his hair and another at the small of his back. Maybe one on his hip, if he's feeling particularly willing to acknowledge the number of limbs. There's the hum here too, spreading vibrations across his skin and through the conductive material of his bones so that there isn't a single part of his body that doesn't feel touched. The words aren't always the same, but there's a similar theme. Baby, baby, baby. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Never let you go. He doesn't even need to think them in English.
He doesn't ask, because he knows he won't get them, because the laws of physics just aren't going to let him have this one.
He extricates one hand from the hard-paned curl of his body and reaches it up to press against the xenonite barrier above him. The vibrations tickle his hand. The panel gets warmer in a flash as Rocky crowds up against it, 700Hz and desperate little taps meeting the skin of Grace's palm. It is a small comfort, but one that he grips onto as tightly as he can, to be touched like this.
He is very tired, and his arm begins to ache, but he does not pull away.