Work Text:
In them, his body and sense of self are different. His role is different. But they are odd and often forgotten, and after falling to aperture, they are forced out by the need to survive.
When they did happen, they were not things he paid attention to– the same way he never let himself ‘pay attention’ to the laughter echoing down apertures halls, or Her orange-clad form standing over him when he woke in the dead of night. The eyes on the walls, the cameras in his throat, were not things he paid attention to. The bugs in his veins…all of it, It was all to be ignored.
Because Doug was a rational man. He demanded this from himself like no other person could; because for him it was a battle.
Everything was a battle.
The dreams faded like dying flowers. He painted over them. Thought of other things.
He supposes it’s a trauma response. Some twisted reaction to that deranged schizophrenic stereotype he’s undoubtedly internalized by now. He can’t trust himself to be dominant, so his subconscious swaps him into the submissive role; cannot trust himself to be a man, so dangerous and penetrative. Another way his mind fucks with him. Another unconscious bias, drilled into him at youth, now filtered in the most inconvenient possible way.
But sometimes he thinks about it. Those distant, alien curves.
He’s perverted, probably. But what can he care? What can he do about it? ‘Soft’ is for people who eat more than once a week, and he is always, always starving.
…But then the nightmare ends.
Then, he’s out.
And he does eat more than once a week.
It makes him feel sick, at first. But then his metabolism readjusts and he becomes…fine, he supposes. He remembers to eat every other day or so. His ribs don’t show through his shirts, and this is about all he needs to get the doctor off his back. His body is efficient enough by then to make up the difference. He doesn’t eat much. He doesn’t need much. He’s used to it.
He has the dreams again.
She is in them.
Despite their nature he never wakes up with any mess to clean. Just shivering in a cold sweat, close to something— perhaps climax or perhaps a breakdown— but whatever it is, he never lets himself resolve it. He is cleaner for the cold showers. Thighs, hips and hands washed away down the drain.
It’s the fact he has energy. Security. The medications wear off at night, so it's only right the delusions would get stronger then. He has been starved, so his impulses turn to indulgence; He has been reserved and so his urges are for vulnerability. It's a natural response; An expected one. One he should feel nothing about, as what he is is his nature, and he has never been anything else.
He can pick apart every knot of causality in his mind if he wants to, and yet it rarely helps.
There is a time when she is picking apples. He’s there simply for the novelty of there being apples to pick. In the simplest of motions, she held one to his face. ‘Try it,’ she said, miming to eat.
He bolts. He doesn’t say anything because he knows he doesn’t need to— he’s an unpredictable schizophrenic and they will fill in the gaps on their own time, and he is bothered only with locking himself away.
And he sat, as the images filled his skull, and he breathed through the visions. Like the rats skittering in the stone walls, the damaged call-and-response croaked to life again, a raw yearning that writhed in his chest like a burrowing worm; worm in the apple core, apple in the orchard, orchard under him, apple in his eye. He does not think of abundance. He thinks of necessity. He thinks of reason. He is fine; he has been fine. He will be fine.
There is another time. A party; one he should not have been invited to and should not have attended. Not for lack of being wanted, but for lack of, mainly, alcohol tolerance. He passed out on the couch. Head in her lap.
She’d stroked his hair, as someone said something about someone he didn’t care about. He was boneless. Loose. Easy. Her hand felt better than anything else in the world, carding through the strands. He had felt— something, raw and warm, carnal. And that had been new. Old. He had been too drunk to find it terrifying. Her hand was calloused, like his. He’d smiled at someone’s joke, and found the motion stiff.
And when he’d woken— when he’d woken. More sober if only for the fact the alcohol seemed to be coming back up again, when he’d stumbled to the bathroom, collapsed at the sink, when he had looked in the mirror— he had seen someone who was not him. She had high cheekbones. She had hunched shoulders. Her hair was dark and stringing, eyeliner wobbled over dim crows feet, mismatched shadows cast themselves over wide, wide eyes. Scared eyes. Doe eyes, eyes of an Angel, eyes of something else.
Stubble under the concealer.
He’d thrown up.
It was a good prank.
The dreams got worse. A fitful three hours of tossing sent him falling, falling into a dream where he saw it all break apart. Like the dreams where She would pick him apart, vivisect him— Crushing claws replaced with hands of flesh, his face morphing and shifting into that other one, that mirror-one, that warmer one so scared in the porcelain glow— his own body falling away, tearing like paper, feeling his head tumble off his shoulders and into her arms, felt her rough hands over his chest, felt her in his skin, between his legs, writhe behind his eyes, felt himself crumple, softness and sinking— no hard edges, no sharp bones, only honesty and endless spiralling curves. He felt her card through his hair with calloused fingers. He felt a sharp agony in his chest as he was ripped away by the morning light.
For the first time since the escape he couldn’t stomach food. Too lightheaded. Too disturbed. He forgot his medication one day and didn’t leave his house the next— People began to notice. People began to ask, and he did not answer, and soon he didn’t answer anything.
It was an obsession, he thought. It was every thought. It was a delusion. So he took two of what they told him to take one of, holed himself up alone somewhere white, and smooth, and quiet, and he told himself what was real. He told himself what was not real. He sat shivering in the bathroom, unable to dry heave any further. He dug his teeth into his knee, and squinted his eyes, and told himself the porcelain blurred from the pain, but not which kind.
But Doug was a resourceful man. He knew when his limit was reached. He had drawn blood; that was the sign to take it out of his own hands.
The last time, he was at the Doctor’s. She was a hard-drawn woman who had never once lied to him, not for kindness and not for malice either. She stared at him with an expression like weary pity, and he met it with apathy. A tired, withered brand of apathy.
If she’d demanded he go under observation, he would have complied. If she was disgusted, he would have understood. Instead she told him in extremely plain terms that he was not having a fucking psychotic break. Was he joking with her, or was this serious? If he wanted estrogen, he should’ve just asked for it. It was the apocalypse. Did he really think she’d care?
He did not say anything.
She kept the cabinet unlocked.
He left with the bottle clutched in his hand hard enough to warp the plastic. He put it on a countertop and left it there. Blue pills.
…His life was never anything but pills.
He was never one to avoid problems; only rationalize them. He could rationalize everything before. He hurt because he was in hell. He was hungry because he hadn’t found food on his last trip out from his den. His arm burned because of the infection, his ribs were defined because of starvation, his lips cracked at not having seen water in days; rational. Expected. Even as a shambling skeleton, he knew that it was rational.
It took three days before he cracked. He sat around in various spots, thinking about anything else. Everything else.
Hallucinations were rational because he is broken. The dreams were rational because what can you expect from a broken man? His psyche will cling to any pleasure it can find. This is rational.
Usually, this is all means to the end of ‘surviving.’ No time to feel the pain, he has to get moving. No time to feel the pleasure either.
Now he is alone in a house, not a complex. Now all he can do is stare at the ceiling because if he rolls over, he will see the bottle, and if he sees the bottle, he will begin to think.
Heat. Fingers carding through his hair. Warm rolls of fat and muscle.
‘Soft.’
…Soft is for people who eat three square meals a day.
As would be rational.
One pill, to start. An experiment.
He’d see how far he got, before it fell apart. It was nothing irreversible. It was nothing real. It couldn’t be. He couldn’t afford for it to be.
Twelve, and he begins to surrender. He does not ache. He does not curl in fetal position at night to press his arms against the thinness of his own ribs, press his calves to his thighs until his muscles ache, and fantasize. He does not roll the shape and the softness inside his mind, whatever softness he has. He is not struck with more dreams than before and he does not begin to derive tangible pleasure from them. He does not accept meals more readily. He does not try to hope where it will go.
He is insane, he thinks. But he does these things anyway. Because he’s not biting his knees or dry-heaving in closets anymore, and this— he thinks— is rational enough.
Thirty-four, and It is fall. He goes outside more. He wears more layers, out of some perverted paranoia, but it only ends up softening his silhouette. He finds a specific way of wearing shirts he likes. He takes some small scrap of pride, for once, in his appearance. He is…something other than what he was. It’s ruined by the beard. It’s ruined by the hollow eyes and sharp cheekbones and wide shoulders, always hunched. It’s ruined by him.
He’s waiting for something, he thinks. He thinks he’s waiting for the moment he sees that face again. The quavering eyeshadow. The high cheekbones, softened by blush. He thinks he’s waiting for that intangible shape he will not name to pin him to the wall, or the bed, or the grass, or run him over with a goddamn pickup until every curve has been pulled out of his flesh without any need for waiting.
But instead he just says hello to her. And he is normal, and usual, and she compliments his sweater in cutting movements. She tells him that he looks healthier.
It's about time, she says, that you started taking care of yourself.
Forty-two, and there is another party. He wanted to be at this one. He still should not have gone.
He stumbled to the bathroom, to change.
Suddenly she is there. They are both it the bathroom, the small, very small bathroom, and she is slightly drunk, he is so fucking drunk stupid he barely understands the words that come out his mouth, but she does. And he is crying, for some reason, saying something about eyeliner. And he is telling her he is scared. And he is telling her all of it, and how badly he wants to feel something, and how the slow torture of change is torture but torture he has no idea how to process yet still needs, how he needs, how he’s so, so fucking tired of thinking. How he doesn’t know how to need. How he doesn’t know how to want, after a lifetime of nothing.
She cradles his head in her hands as he chokes through tears about how he’d rather someone shoot him in the head than do this, how this is his only hope, but he has no clue how to hope, and it’s terrifying and it’s all he’s ever had and how she is the only person he has ever met that’s made him believe change is possible. And that she is everything.
He asks her to forget anything he says when he’s like this, because if she finds out she’s the only thing that does make him feel, she’ll hate him. He begs her to do this. He clutches her hands. They have callouses.
He wakes up back home. He wakes wrapped in blankets that aren’t his. There’s eyeliner, standing proud beside the bottle on his bedside table, and he knows.
A note left. A promise made.
Forty-three.
Fifty-four.
Seventy.
Ninety.
One-hundred and twenty-two pills.
One-hundred and twenty-two sunrises. One-hundred and twenty-two second chances.
She sees them all.