One year, ten months, and twenty days ago
PAIN.
Searing, incredible pain shattered across his face when Theo rolled over onto his right side in his sleep. All of a sudden his pillow was made of broken glass, stabbing and tearing into his skin, driving an ice pick straight into his brain.
He screamed.
He flipped onto his back again, fumbling for the pain pills on the table next to his bed. But his hand was shaking too hard, and he couldn’t quite grab the bottle. His stitches were only freshly out of the wounds on his arm and they were still raw, still red, still aching, but no longer bleeding. At least, not on the outside. But his grip was still shot, his nerves still damaged, his skin still burning, constantpins and needles and electric static jolting down his shoulder and across his palm to the tips of his fingers.
He leaned too far to the side and nearly passed out from the pressure on his right hip.
Theo froze in his bed, gasping like a fish out of water, and even that movement was painful, given how difficult it was to open his mouth wide with the lingering swelling from his wound. The ragged way he sucked for air through the fire searing across his body and face made his throat burn.
Coming home alone this early was a disaster.
It was stupid.
Fuckingidiotic.
Why did he demand this?
He coughed, drew in a slow, steadying breath, and finally managed to grab the little amber bottle, holding it still enough to twist the cap open with his left hand before immediately swallowing two pills dry. He rolled back onto his pillow and traced every bit of their journey down his esophagus, watching the shadows dance on his ceiling with his one good eye and trying not to panic when the meds slowed their descent and stuck in his throat.
Whydidhe insist on coming back so soon?
Everything was fuzzy. He couldn’t even remember coming home. He did have a few memories: the sound of shattering glass and him screaming at someone—his mother, probably—while he was standing upright, leaning heavily against a wall for support. Then a different kind of screaming, a gut-wrenching wail, doubled over and anguished, as if his soul were being ripped apart. Wetness on his face. His hand tugging at his hair. A deep, aching sense of emptiness and disgust.
Aside from that? Not much. There were only vague impressions of movement, the sensation of rocking, and the feeling of someone helping him up the stairs, a familiar, soothing male voice murmuring while a strong arm held him steady at his back.
He glanced over at the cane propped up next to the bed. It was one of those aluminum ones with four feet and a curved, padded handle, telescoping and set almost at its maximum for his height. He hated it. He fuckinghated it.
This was what he’d been reduced to:
A cripple.
He blinked, and the memory of bright, approaching lights flashed in his mind, blinding him anew.
His world shattered again along with it.
Dad’s dead.
Nothing but glassy eyes surrounded by crumpled steel.
Oh.
Right.
That was why.
It was because being in that house again had been unbearable.
His breathing stuttered now under the sheer weight of it.
Dad’s dead, his corpse buried deep and rotting in the ground, and it’s your fault.
A tear slipped out of his left eye and rolled down the side of his face.
Theo didn’t remember much, but he did remember being trapped in his mother’s house. The feeling of those old, white walls and low ceilings closing in around him.
