Who: Jack (closed, narrative) What: Jack has problems! And has forgotten he has a monitor on. Where: Hamartia When: After this. Warnings: Self-harm type things, buyer beware.
Jack had a bad habit that he kept to himself. It was personal, and it was private, and he had no intention of anyone he knew ever finding out about it. It had started sometime around the when he had discovered just what his ability was. As he cemented what his purpose would be in this new world, he had decided to test the limits of his healing with a razor to the inside of his forearm.
He had been surprised when the wound didn't heal, the way everything else had, the way teeth had replaced themselves and bones had re knitted and been whole, and the explanation came easily. Nothing excused this wounding. He did it to himself, and so it stayed, angry and red, trailing blood onto the chipped and cracked white tile of his bathroom.
That should have been the end of that. But a few days later he had been sitting in his apartment, unable to sleep. It had only been a month since he'd woken up from his coma, and the scar on his face was still pink and bright. He had lain on the mattress in his bedroom, trying not to think, trying to think of something other than dark eyes and dark hair and screaming.
He had remembered the razor in the bathroom, the wounds that stuck, and he had sat against the wall with the razor in hand. He had thought I shouldn't, but rationality was harder to come by in those first few months, so he had taken the razor to his arm again and felt a shuddering kind of release.
A cycle started up. Not very often, just when things seemed to be too much, just when acting as if everything was fine out on the street took more from him than a lash across his back, he went for the razor. Periods of use came and went and came again. For a while, after joining the boards, meeting people, connecting for the first time since coming to Humanity, he had stopped. But then there were nights and days where things pressed in catastrophically, where he made mistakes and things went wrong, and he took a release of sin out on himself. Blood would well up, and he would think of home. Nothing else worked, not drinking or drugs, all poisons that his body made quick work of and rendered ineffective, so he took the only relief he could find where he could find it. He assumed this was a side effect of going insane, wondered what the doctors would have said, about this and brain damage. He likely couldn't blame that. This was all him, his own sickness, finding something in pain, the only physical sensation that meant anything to him anymore.
He wore long sleeves even on warm days, and he kept it a secret he planned to take to whatever grave he found, one day. He had no desire for pity or attention, no want for anyone to know. All he wanted them to see, all he could really bear for them to see, was someone who rounded up to normal, someone they could rely on to be their friend and to take care of things when they went awry.
It had been a while since Jack had gone for the razor when he saw the article in the Times about the Night Terror being let go. The anger he felt reading the quote was incomparable. How dare he masquerade as innocent, like he was a human being and not a dog that ought to be put down.
He had been on the way home from the job he had picked up a few days prior, working as a mechanic under the table for a place that couldn't afford to give him insurance. He'd picked the newspaper up from the ground, fluttering its way down the street, and carried it all the way back to Hamartia.
He slammed the door shut and tried to think of something, anything that would allow him to cool off and calm down. He had to go looking for him, though he knew he'd be long gone by now - or maybe not, maybe someplace in plain sight where he would be waiting for Jack to come, so that he could make himself into a victim yet again.
Jack wanted to pluck out his eyes and drive a nail into his heart. The monitor around his ankle felt like a ball and chain keeping him from doing what needed to be done.
He went into the bathroom of the dingy apartment and shut the door. He pulled the razor down off the edge of the sink, and flipped it open, contemplating the sharp edge. He rolled up his sleeve, bringing it down against his skin, in the midst of a scattering of scars much like it. Some had faded almost to nothingness, some were still pink and bright. When blood rolled off the edge of his arm, it followed the raised edges around and down, landing like a tiny island of crimson on the white tile floor. His breathing slowed, and he calmed some, and he pressed the blade in again, just above the first cut.
And then the communicator sitting on the table in the living room began to beep softly, and he cursed.