thewebspinner:

[He shakes for a good fifteen minutes, swallowing around the lump in his throat. It’s the glancing up that’s the mistake, Jim catches his own eye in the mirror and it’s a surge of something, something like anger or loathing that rises in him like bile. He doesn’t make a sound, no animal howl of rage, just the sound of shattering glass when his knuckles impact the mirror. There’s twelve now, gleaming in broken mirror, twelve copies, twelve perfect copies, so he breaks it again until the pieces are too small to reflect much of anything anymore.

Then, and only then, knuckles bloodied and feeling sick and oddly lonely, he returns to bed. Not unlike a child, he crawls into the centre and usurps one of the pillows, wrapping his arms around it and hugging it to his chest to rest his cheek against. Jim draws his knees up and wishes that he was a planet, or a star, a star collapsing in on itself, burnt too hot and too bright and forming a black hole to draw everything into its hold and never give them back.

He hiccups once or twice, but remains otherwise silent, looking at his bloodied knuckles.]

[It’s the sound of smashing glass that lets him know that, whatever he’s waiting for, he should stop now. That whatever’s going on in Jim head needs to be sucked away before it kills him.

A thousand years ago, the answer would have been a good trepanning. Unfortunately it turns out holes in your skull don’t cause much more than brain damage and infection.

So, fine, the best way to draw poison out of Jim is to invite it all into himself. He stands and briefly drifts toward the bathroom before changing his mind; he can deal with the damage later.

He sits on the edge of the bed, trying to avoid the unavoidable creak of shifting bedsprings. It doesn’t really matter, Jim set on ignoring him. He stretches out on it, wraps both his arms around Jim’s torso, trapping the man’s arms in place, and pulls them together back to chest. Perhaps he’s holding on to tightly; if he is, he doesn’t notice.]