warm and sickly and sweet and dancing around him

Alistair doesn’t take his mask off anymore. It wasn’t like he took it off much anyway, but he finds himself going day in and out with the delicate bow at the back going untouched.

When he does take it off, he’s disgusted and delirious and so proud, the results of his self-inflicted starvation clear on his face. Sharp, taut, sallow skin stretching over his cheekbones, sagging below his eyes. So cold, so cold. The scabbed lips he inspects are unfamiliar, the constant biting turning them numb and swollen. Dark, patchy blood, long since dried, is smeared across his cheek. He probably wiped his face at some point, and, yeah, he did, he thinks as he looks down and sees the same, smudged red on the back of his hand, barely distinguishable from the rest of the sores on his hand.

It is a habit he has picked up more recently. Night after night, he finds himself scratching at his hands, hissing in pain as his nails scratch shakily down his palms. They bleed, and he smiles. A lasting impression. Raised, angry skin. There is nothing like the euphoria he feels when the nail rips, or the razor presses down into weeping white lines.

He has not washed in two weeks. He wants nothing more than to see his progress, yet his eyes rip away whenever he attempts to raise the sweater over his head.

 

“I’m everything you’ve ever wanted to be, huh?”

Everything is cold. Three steps back, a thud, and he is down. Valentina stands at the end of the alley, light glowing around his silhouette like a halo. He is beautiful, so beautiful. If he hadn’t dropped his camera at his feet, he would have snapped a picture. His love is pure, it is devotion, unlike the impure passion that stretches across the pentacle of Hesio. It is the epitome of absolute good.

“You’re never going to be me, Alistair. You’re alone, and you always will be.”

 

 

Alistair smiles.

Sometimes, the memories are just like a dream. Warm, sweet, familiar. It sings like the lull of sleep, brings back the euphoria that drives him forward. It gives him drive, shakes him awake, tells him that he can do it, tells him that it will be over soon, that all he needs to do is in front of him and then he can finally sleep.

Sleep.

The mattress is thrown onto the floor, blankets tossed somewhere far. He likes the dull pain of sleeping on the bare planks – not a freaky self-hatred thing, he swears – and the creaking of his back after a sleepless night. Something in his brain screams at him to try, at least try, to sleep tonight, so he does. He heaves the mattress, wincing at how weak he has gotten in the past weeks, and after half an hour, and one hell of a leg cramp, his bed somewhat resembles something cohesive.

When he awkwardly wiggles into the sheets and takes one of the old pillows into his arms, something clicks. He closes his eyes, and suddenly he is light, floating, curled up and weightless in the dark. He feels small, so small, but it is a comforting feeling, warm and sweet and sickly and dancing around him, blanketing him in a soft haze instead of the gangly, dry, heaving insecurity that plagues him nightly.

He will realise, at some point, that he can’t go to sleep no matter how hard he tries. That the curse will never lift, that he's digging his grave with everything he does. But at least, here, things are okay. For now.