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fandomweekly2019-02-28 08:58 am
[#009] Failing (The Big Chill)
Title: Failing
Fandom: The Big Chill
Rating/Warnings: BIG WARNING for attempted suicide, please do not read if this is upsetting to you. T for that alone.
Bonus: Yes
Word Count: 670
Summary: He's never been so grateful to have failed at something.
Oh.
No.
Alex struggles to make sense of the face he’s staring at. The mess of dirty blond hair, the slightly unfocused blue eyes. The shape, narrow but not thin, the planes of it. It was the kind of face that would look handsome if it smiled, but not when it isn’t.
It hasn’t looked handsome, he doesn’t think, in a while.
It’s his, but he doesn’t feel anything about it.
The things he does feel come in fits and starts.
He’s very drunk.
Not too drunk to be careful.
If he’s lucky, the scar will be neat. The scar will be neat, that is, if he has one. If he’s lucky, he’s going to have one. If he’s lucky, he thinks, desperately, he could have a scar for fifty or sixty years. The last ten months, he hasn’t wanted anything, and then he’d decided he wanted one very specific thing, the last thing he thought he’d ever want, and now he wants this. To spend the next fifty or sixty years with a scar.
He wants the scar, and he wants whatever ulcer the pills might give him, and he wants… he’ll figure out what else he wants.
It hadn’t hurt until he’d wrapped the towel around it and suddenly there was pain, but he thinks he wants that, too, it’s something, and maybe he’ll remember it, maybe he’ll remember that he fucked this up and he didn’t like it and he doesn’t want this, not really. He wanted and then he didn’t and he fucked it all up, he fucked it all up, but he’s glad he did, because he wants he wants he wants…
He wants to go stargazing.
He wants to sit by the water somewhere and not think about anything.
He wants to go to the library and spend all day there and think about everything.
He wants to call everyone he knows even if he doesn’t know what he’ll say.
He wants to get a dog. Or a cat. Or a fish. Or a plant. It doesn’t matter, but a thing, a life he actually cares about being responsible for.
He wants to go dancing.
He wants more things than he thinks he’s wanted in a year, in two years, and he’s never been so hideously grateful to have failed in his life.
At least, he thinks he’s failing. He turns away from the pale, horrified man standing dazed in his bathroom and he makes himself dial just three digits on the phone, it shouldn’t be so hard except he’s using one of his hands to hold a towel tight around the opposite wrist and trying not to think about the wet heat against his palm, but he thinks he’s failing.
He tries not to think about the smears of red he leaves, on the telephone handset, on the memo pad, on the pencil, as he leaves a barely legible note. He wasn’t going to leave one, for if he’d succeeded. This is one for when he fails. Because failing, he thinks, is going to be a long, hard process, and he doesn’t think he can keep failing alone.
H- Bring Michael, the note reads. No one else is going to understand. Michael is.
He’d taken Michael’s razor once. Hidden his own. When his parents had died, and he’d grown that beard, and they’d been in vogue so no one had questioned it. They hadn’t discussed it, either, but he’d gotten rid of Michael’s razor when he’d seen him the morning after the news, seen him pick it up and then put it down a little too fast and hard without shaving. He’d watched him like a hawk the first few days, and still watched him close for that first year. And the beard had stayed, had just become normal Michael.
He should have given him the opportunity to return the favor, instead of cutting him out.
He wants, more than anything, to give him the opportunity now to return the favor, next time.
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This kind of failure has to be the best kind of failure.
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