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He saw the blood slowly bubbling up on the fresh cut, red droplets beginning to form, some bigger than others
On all of the 10 different cuts 5 on his right leg, 5 on his left
Welp
A month of being clean down the drain
The cuts themselves weren’t particularly deep but they still bleed a little, he crawled over and grabbed a couple of squares of toilet paper and started to lightly dab at the blood, after he made sure no more of the droplets were there he took a look at himself. The blood had stained his skin slightly and it only made the cuts on his leg look a lot more red and angry that they actually were, it was a big contrast to the pale faded lines just below them, reminders of a time much worse than this one, it didn’t help that blood was beginning to seep from the them yet again
He sighed, this wasn’t the first time he had ended up like this after a particularly bothersome day, honestly? He was just mildly irritated with himself
A month that was now meaningless, that reflection about being ok from a few days back meant nothing apparently
Well, not really
For some reason this always seemed to happen, he’d be better for a while, randomly ruin it one day, and then move on with his life and pretend it never happened, it was kinda weird to him, usually when he heard about someone relapsing it was a lot more damage and the person kept doing it after that
But Steven? He’d mess up one day and return to being fine the next, a very in-the-moment kinda thing, it always happened for some reason, any time he was clean for a long while, there was one or two instances were he did a couple of cuts and then didn’t touch a knife to his skin in weeks or months, that’s why he was only mildly irritated, eh, well, to be fair those instances he only really did like one cut and then nothing else, 10 was definitely not the plan, but there wasn’t anything overly stressful so hopefully he could go back to not touching the box cutter he had for a while.
Should he probably get help about this? Yeah. Would he get help for it? Nah, telling people “oh yeah I’ve actually been cutting myself on and off for like two years and never told you!” wasn’t a conversation that he was particularly looking forward to, one he had been avoiding all this time, did he ever plan to tell his family? Maybe, like a few years after he ACTUALLY stopped, maybe then he’d finally get the guts to do so
He dabbed the cuts once more to get rid of any remaining blood, why did he even do this? Today had been annoying, his breakfast sucked and the gems kept prying at his life once again, and amethysts kept bothering him about going out despite the fact he really wanted to just stay in for today, but he didn’t really think all that justified breaking his streak, and it certainly didn’t justify the 10 cuts now littering his thighs… was it because he had been remembering how things used to be lately?
For some reason he’d been thinking a lot of how he was before,much, much worse than how he is now, why had he even been thinking about it though? He didn’t really know, well, whatever the case, he should probably just finish cleaning up, and keep going with his day
The cuts weren’t bleeding anymore, that was good, he remembered that back then whenever he didn’t want to wait for the cut to stop bleeding, he’d slap tape on it so it didn’t stain his clothes, how on earth he didn’t get an infection at least once was beyond him, actually he should probably disinfect this somehow
He made his way to the sink and everything scattered along the counter, did he have anything to disinfect stuff? He looked over the various different things he had and picked up a bottle of hand sanitizer, good enough
He put a drop next the cuts and slowly started to rub it on his leg, he winced at the burning sensation of pain, it was painfully familiar, he did this a lot, for some reason he kinda liked the feeling, the stinging sensation of it felt nice, that was probably bad but he didn’t really care . He grabed another square and starts taking the gel off , the stains the blood had left were no longer there and you could see that the lines weren’t actually that red and that they were thinner than they looked, that was good, lines like those faded faster
He stood up and threw all of the papers he had into the toilet before flushing and then hiding his cuter, successfully getting rid of the evidence of any sort of harm being made in here
With all that done he stood up and left, pretending he didn’t just do what he did, he probs shouldn’t have done that
But old habits die hard