WHO: Much WHEN: Over the weekend WHERE: The parsonage WHAT: :( WARNINGS: Self loathing stuff.
Much spent the weekend in his room.
Friday he did not give a shit. About anything or anyone. He stared at the corner of his room for a long, long time. The wallpaper was grey-green and peeling a little. Much got his thumbnail underneath it and burrowed, making it worse, making everything worse. That was his big achievement of the morning.
He didn’t remember being dead, but he thought: if you were conscious and dead at the same time, this would be what it felt like. Heavy cold limbs and a hole for a heart. Conscious of rotting away from the inside.
In the afternoon he clomped around the parsonage and shrugged whenever anyone tried to talk to him and ate a bit of the food Tuck made for lunch. The cold cuts of lamb tasted like nothing, the relish was slimy, the bread turned clammy in his mouth. He didn’t bother with dinner, if food was going to be like that. Alan came over and tried to get him to sing and Much just stared at him. He’d never felt less like singing in his life. When Tuck joined in, Much went back to his room and slammed the door.
He didn’t sleep a lot but he did spend most of the day in bed, or sometimes underneath it. At one point he thought about banging his head against the wall, but he didn’t have the energy.
Saturday was worse because he was starting to give a shit again, and with that came a great gnawing sense of awfulness, too big to name. Over and over and over he replayed different things in his head, snippets of conversations he couldn’t forget. Stutely’s deep frustration with ‘I'll give you no point, you shit’ (you shit you shit you shit) and the cutting tone in Erica’s voice when she said ‘aren’t you old enough to know that shouldn't is a meaningless word’ (you meaningless shit) and the cold flat black and white words from Marian ‘I find it hard to trust you’ (meaningless untrustworthy shit) and Tuck’s castrating ‘we don’t stop the bad guys’ (meaningless untrustworthy shit who can’t even help anyone) and Marian screaming at him to stop talking to Addy because he was making the threat of being tortured by the devil worse (meaningless untrustworthy shit who can’t help anyone and only makes things worse.) All of them circling like razor blades in a hurricane, no context, just weaponised words.
Then there was Sloth whispering Don’t forget me like a promise, or a curse. Doomed meaningless untrustworthy shit who isn’t going to be able to help anyone ever again and will only make things worse forever.
But... then he remembered the way Leila treated him like he was the only place that made her feel safe after Guy had drugged her, hurt her. The way she grabbed his shirt and pulled herself close and the way she’d called him, and not anyone else, when she needed help.
And he remembered Marcie’s significant look across the bar toward him, I might be in the job market soon.
It was a glimmer, in the awfulness. Maybe he still felt like bashing his head against the wall and maybe, this time, hope stopped him, instead of apathy.
For a little while he considered getting up and joining Tuck wherever he was in the house, get out of his own head for a bit... but the fear that he would say something to Tuck that would hurt his feelings was too real.
If other people’s words were weapons, his own were worse. Sometimes they left his mouth in anger and he understood why they hurt, but it was the words that came from a good place, that twisted into unintentional weapons when they hit who he was talking to, that he couldn’t bear.
His words were weapons and he had no idea how to disarm them. Well. Sloth had managed that. Disarmed him good and proper.
He pretended to be asleep when Tuck checked on him, then waited till he was in the shower to emerge from his room and forage for food. With a bag of white bread and a jar of peanut butter he skulked back to his room and existed on that like a gremlin.
Late on Sunday night he stood in the shower for a long, long time, till every last hope of warmth had been drained from the showerhead. The loop of the things his friends had said to him spiraled down the drain eventually, too, and he thought of the way Marian had hugged him after his encounter with the Sheriff at Diogenes, Tuck’s relentless cups of tea and Will’s comradery, the way Leila looked at him like he was a gift and Stutely’s offers of quiet support, Alan’s welcome-back-to-life watermelon, Little John’s constant teasing that he forgot Much’s name, turning the whole thing into a joke to be laughed at instead of some stupid real fear, and... and he-still-didn’t-want-to-think-about-Robin, but he could find all the good in the rest of them.
Just not in himself.
Returning to his room, Much screwed up his nose. The place felt small and suffocating, and kind smelled liked he’d used and abused all the air in it over the last two days. He left his wet towel on the floor and climbed out his window, clearing the herb bed that ran along the side of the house.
He clomped over to sit beneath a tree on the lawn, his back against the trunk, knees up, elbows on his knees, head propped up by his hands, spine a miserable curve.
The worst bit, he’d discovered by Sunday night, was the shame.
The shame wasn’t going anywhere.
She’d taken something from him, and he hadn’t been strong enough to fight it. Even when the Sheriff had been bearing down on him in the woods, even when he knew he’d been overpowered then, he’d still fought. Died screaming, sure, but he’d managed to call the Sheriff a shitmuncher while he was doing it. He hadn’t called Sloth anything, hadn’t even tried, and she’d reached inside his head and ruined it.
Even after the self loathing and guilt had faded to a dull roar the shame still shone bright as new copper.
Much didn’t know what to do with it. He didn’t even know how to start burying it, he only he knew he had to.
As his mind circled in a toxic feedback loop, his ears picked up a sound in the bushes nearby.
Something was moving toward him.
Much dropped his fingers from his face, but didn’t otherwise move. He wasn’t scared; the sound was more animal than human, and the sound of animals at night rustling in the bushes was a deeply familiar, even comforting one.
The tips of two of Tuck’s lavender bushes shook as something moved near the ground, between them, and after a moment the bushes parted as a gnome backed out toward him.
Much went even more still. The gnome wasn’t looking toward the shadows of the tree because he was concentrating on dragging a garden gnome statue in a bikini behind him. Much made a breathy noise of disbelief and the gnome froze, looking at him with a blazing suspicion. The two stared at each other for a long moment, before the gnome snapped at him: “Get your filthy eyes off my wife!” and stared dragging the statue with great haste toward the bushes around the side of the church.
Much didn’t move for a very long time, watching the bushes shrouded in shadows. Watching the lavender again, touched by streetlights. That was... a thing that just happened.
One part of really, really wanted to tell the others, and the rest of him told him that the first thing he posted after... after whatever had happened to him couldn't be about the fact that gnomes were real and a horny one lived behind the church.
So, Much went to bed, and didn't say anything at all.