thewebspinner:

[It’s really quite difficult to tell whether he’s being restrained or comforted in the gesture, whether the arms around him are designed to keep him from doing anything or just to keep him at all. He can’t really move his biceps from where they’re pinned, but the curl of his arms allows him to fist the fingers of one hand into his hair tightly, the other resting bloodied knuckles against his forehead.

His shoulders bear up, or his head bears down, like the tight coiling of a spring, but it’s not restless energy that trembles in the taut set of his muscles as it usually is, but a helpless kind of frustration at absolutely everything.

The thing that feels the most like being punched in the chest is this. Laying here, Sebastian’s chest hot against his back, curling together as happens occasionally on those nights, which happen more often than not these days, when he doesn’t throw the sniper out straight away, but keeps him there until discomfort moves one or the other of them out. It’s usually Jim that kicks Sebastian out, or, unable to sleep, leaves himself, but sometimes, very rarely, and only when he’s completely exhausted himself, do they both manage to last the night through within touching distance.

Jim can’t help himself, really, he can’t, magpie mind drawn back to the thousands of tiny shards on the bathroom floor, glittering in the sink, the hundreds of faces looking back at him, the countless others that share his face, his name, and now this too, whatever this is. Thinks about it. Thinks and loathes, so purely, with every atom of what he is, so futilely that the frustration claws out of his chest and splashes down his face when he sobs, once, twice, and catches himself. Stops. Can’t stop the shaking though. He twitches with it, convulses, like a frog, or a rat, pinned down and electrocuted, again and again, made to dance.]

[Yes, of course, he’s known that he’d done serious wrong. But he doesn’t know exactly how wrong that wrong is until just then, until the moment he hears the first hiccuped sob and it chills him all the way down.

There are many things he’s seen Jim do in his extreme and various moods, things that would make grown men weep and little girls laugh, things which have seemed perfectly normal and have been odd for it and things which were so out of the bounds of common human interaction that trying to discern their reasoning has bent Sebastian’s mind out of shape.

Out of all of those things, he has never actually seen or heard Jim cry. The very idea of it seemed impossible: at least until now.

He has no idea what to do.

So, in possibly the worst showing of human understanding, he doesn’t do anything. He merely holds on, his face contorted in an odd mix of guilt and wide-eyed surprise.-