Night came and he drifted to sleep. The green eyes were there. Watching him in the dark. 

His limbs weighed him down and all the strength he had was ripped away. He wanted to stay away. He couldn’t fight the sleep creeping to the corners of his eyes and crawled on his body like hands seeking a place to burrow. 

He fell into a soft slumber in what he thought was the middle of the night. The darkness before his eyes changed rapidly, short clips flashing on and off. 

He was in the bathtub. Blood rippled in the water in thin rings like an angel’s halo. Dots dotted the surface. They pitter-pattered from his soaked hair. 

His hands were submerged. He couldn’t look anywhere. 

His hands brushed something hard at the bottom. 

He stomach twisted. He gagged, hating that he could feel the object, but didn’t know what it was. He tried to force his eyes to look somewhere else, tried to force his hands to stop touching it, but the dream had ideas of it own. It was set on playing this nightmare out whether he liked it or not. 

His hand wrapped around the object. He then realized it wasn’t just one. There were many. 

Before he had the chance to process what they could be, he pulled his hand out of the water.

The water was cold. It was freezing. He shivered.

His hand broke the surface.

He gagged harder when he saw what he was holding.

Broken fingers.

Bruised and stained red. Slimy from sitting in the water for too long. Bloated with a green-blue discoloration.

They dropped from his hand. He jumped from the tub. Red water splashed all over the white bathroom. He wretched, turning his face away. The smell was too real. He wretched again and he cried when nothing came up. He squeezed his eyes closed, sobbing while the image of the fingers wouldn’t get out of his head. 

He tried to wake up, but he couldn’t. He knew it was a dream, knew this wasn’t real, but he couldn’t convince his mind. He felt the pain, the disgust, and the fear. 

His head was pushed under water. It rushed into his lungs and he fought for air.

He woke up with a gasp.

In a frantic mess, he felt along the sheets, kicking the comforter off the bed. The material felt familiar. Like his own.

The light turned on. 

“Varian?”

He covered his eyes. The bright light streaming through the doorway was too much. His heart fluttered as he thought the man had come back to hurt him again. 

His eyes focused. He pulled his hand away, adjusting to the dark room and the bright hallway.

Standing in the doorway was his mom. She was crying. The tears ran down her face in a constant stream. Her hand was pressed over his heart. The pain on her face was too much for him to bare. He could feel it. 

It was the same pain he’d felt back in the horrid house he’d been locked in.

The sob that was ripped out of her shook him to the bone.

That was when he knew he was home.

***

One Month Later

Varian pulled the white shirt over his head. He pulled it down until it was stretched over the belt he wore with his back jeans. It took him a long time to let go of the fabric. He could see the indentation of his fingers in it. He’d ruined it.

Just another thing to put on his destroyed list. 

He stared into the bathroom mirror. His reflection was shittier looking that how he felt. His eyes seemed to droop at the outside corners. Like someone had tilted them to make him look like he’d been put through a grinder.

The black circles didn’t help either. He was never happy with his looks in the first place. Padriac was the looker of the group. He had girls falling over one another to get his attention. Kacey wasn’t pretty, but he was handsome in the bad boy kind of way.

Varian didn’t even come close to dangerously good looking. He was average. Decent. He wasn’t repulsive.

It was just…

He was sad. And when people looked at him, they got sad. No one wanted to be around someone who constantly brought down the mood.

A white ghost was all he could see. He saw someone he couldn’t relate to. He was looking at a stranger.

He turned away from the mirror.

The mirror was his enemy from now on. Nothing would change. There was really no need for him to even bother with it.

Almost like he didn’t need to bother caring about how he looked in his clothes. It wasn’t like it was going to make him look better.

But it was going to make everyone think he was getting better. Even if that was the farthest from the truth. 

He couldn’t wear shorts anymore. It was a good thing it was always cold. There was the occasional warm day and it was uncomfortable when the heat got to him. He could deal with it.

He couldn’t risk anyone seeing the scars. 

The scars in question were long jagged lines that ran from the top of his knees all the way to his hip. He’d started to run out of carving space and he hated going over healed scars. It didn’t feel the same.

It didn’t hurt like it was supposed to when it wasn’t virgin skin.

He also didn’t like looking at them. It was a reminder that he was weak. The scars weren’t something he was proud of. No one should be. He didn’t like that he was the reason behind them. It wasn’t like he hadn’t had enough pain when…

He flicked the bathroom light off and descended down the stairs. It was a lot harder to push away the constant bad thoughts and the urge to put the blade against his skin. It wasn’t good. And it wasn’t easy to talk about.

The hallway lead to the kitchen where his mom, dad, and his sister were eating breakfast. They weren’t talking, even before he entered the room. They all sat away from each other, like they were afraid being too close would set someone off. Or that being close would somehow make the awkward setting worse.

He didn’t know how it could get worse. Maybe him being around. He was a constant reminder that things had changed. Their lives would never be the same again.

And it was his fault.

The treading around as if he was a ticking bomb became a new normal. They rarely spoke. When they did talk to him, they brought up unimportant and unrelated things. 

How was your day? Did you like the movie we watched yesterday? What are you doing? Have you read this new book? Have you spoken to Hazel? Are you talking to your friends?

It was a never ending stream of nonsense. He didn’t care about any of those things anymore. And though he wanted to tell them he didn’t want to talk at all, he put up with it. He was trying to get better. Even if it didn’t feel like trying was doing much of anything.

It was making things worse. It made him tired and a little out of his mind. He wished they would just leave him to rot in his bedroom and pretend he never existed.

Or that he’d died in that house. 

He slowly walked into the room. There was one chair left open for him. He pulled it out. The legs screeched across the linoleum. The deafening silence that followed after made his ears ring. He swallowed down the lump in his throat and sat down.

Anne—his sister—took a bite of her cereal. She slowly chewed, glancing at him from the corner of her eyes. She looked away when he tried to meet her gaze.

He slumped in his chair and looked at the table. 

His mom coughed. “Um. How are you feeling?”

She pushed a plate of toast toward him and a small bowl of scrambled eggs mixed with bacon. His stomach twisted.

“Good,” he said. What he really wanted to say was that he felt like shit. 

He swallowed those words down as well. 

He pushed the bowl of eggs and bacon away.

“I’m not eating meat anymore.”

His mom looked at his dad. “Oh.”

He was keeping the truth away from them to protect them. They didn’t need to know he was fighting with the dark urge to off himself in the middle of the night. 

But he couldn’t hide everything. 

There were times when he had to be explicit with what had happened to him. The police needed to do their job even when it felt like it was futile. He also had to open up to a counselor. After awhile, telling someone how he felt didn’t work like it should have. He felt nothing. He didn’t want to feel anything in the first place.

But it felt like he needed to for him to be a normal human being. Was it bad that before all this happened he hadn’t felt much in the first place?

He had to open up so the man who’d done this would be found.

Yet, convincing himself that he was doing the right thing was harder than he imagined.

“Are you excited about your first day back?”

He took a small bite of his toast. She’d slathered cream cheese on top of it.

He could barely taste it. It was faint. Like a memory he was chasing.

He shrugged.

They didn’t know what to say. They were walking on eggshells because they didn’t want to hurt him. They were careful with their words, but in the end, them being careful was what made it all the more worse.

“I’m sure it’s going to be great.”

She reached across the small table and touched his hand. 

He met her eyes.

He wanted to believe her. He really did.

But as he pulled his hand away—sick from the unwanted touch—he knew he was just fooling himself.