FicWad

It was over. He'd left you, at long last. He said he wanted to stay, but he couldn't. That he loved you, but he didn't want to be the one to find you when you finally did yourself in. That your favorite vice would eventually do you in, destroying him in the process. That he couldn't stand watching you suffer anymore. That no matter how much he tried helping you, you refused to be helped.

You'd begged him not to go. You said you'd change. You'd give up your vice, all your bad habits. You'd get professional help if that's what it took. Rehab, even. You'd do anything to get him to stay with you.

He refused your offers. You'd lied to him one too many times. Now, this time, when you were telling the truth, this one rare time, he refused to believe you. It serves you right, for all the times you'd betrayed his trust. For all the times he'd believed you would change.

You even went so far as to ask him if he would give you a second change if you changed. The answer was a resounding no. He was sick of being lied to.

He left that night to go stay with a friend. He said he'd be back in a few days to get the stuff he had left there.

You cried for hours that night. Your apartment felt empty, and you felt lost on your bed, all alone. The previously comfortable piece of furniture felt larger than any one thing had a right to be. It was a vast, empty ocean, and you were a small rowboat knocked loose from it's moorings by a storm, with no hope of rescue.

You called in sick to work the next day, saying you had food poisoning. You spent the day in bed, curled up in one of his sweatshirts. You didn't bother to get out of bed for anything more than a quick bathroom break. Even that, however, was forced. Your world had just come crashing down around you. Why hadn't the earth at large stopped spinning?

Your time was spent alternating between sobbing your heart out until your throat was raw, your nose stuffed, your chest hurting, breathing near impossible, and sleeping off the aftermath of your last crying fit.

The next day passed much the same, and the day after, too. With each passing day, it became more apparent to you that he wasn't coming back, that you'd lost the last good thing in your life. Any time you had somethinng good in your life, you inevitably lost it. This time was no different.

Finally, on the 4th day after he left, you convinced yourself to leave the bed for more than a few minutes. You needed a bath.

You filled the tub with scalding hot water, and bubble bath. The water was hot enough that it scalded your skin. You didn't care. You welcomed the pain, craved it, needed it. It was enough to make you feel a bit better, if only for a moment, about the whole situation that you had found yourself in.

You couldn't quite tell how long you sat there after rubbing away the grime of the past several days, it might have been mere minutes, or it could have been hours, and either way, you wouldn't have cared. Time no longer mattered to you.

Eventually, you figured that you should get out of the water. You made a move to get up, but stopped when a flash of silver caught your eye. There, mostly hidden by a bottle of shampoo on the edge of the tub, was a single straight edged razor blade. You recalled losing one several weeks ago in here when you were doing one or another home improvement project.

Your hand reached out, as if in a daze, and picked it up. The sharp edged poked themselves into your fingers, and a drop of blood fell into your bath water. Looking at it more closely, you could tell that it was fairly encrusted in rust, and one edge looked like it had seen better days. The other side, however, looked like it still had some life left in it.

You knew that logically, if this failed, you risked major infection due to the state that this thing was in, but you couldn't bring yourself to care. You would make sure that you didn't survive this. There was no reason to survive this. You had nothing left to live for. All you had to return to if you did make it was a job you hated, classes you couldn't stand for a degree in a profession you never wanted, and a shitty apartment that felt too empty.

This thought in your mind, you plunged the good end of the blade as hard as you could into the soft flesh of the underside of your forearm, right below the elbow. A wave of pain hit you hard enough to make your eyes water, and your teeth grit in involuntary reaction.

This alone would have been enough to stop any sane person. However, you weren't sane. Not anymore. Whatever sanity and common sense you'd had walked out with him that night in his pockets.

Instead, you grabbed the blade again, point still embedded in your arm, and dragged it down towards your wrist. The pain was excruciating, but it was nothing compared to your emotional pain. You felt skin, muscle, tendons, blood vessels, all of them resisting for but a moment, then giving way under the sharp edge of the blade. In the wake of the metal, there was a large gap between the edges of your skin, and in sick fascination, you couldn't help but stare.

You could see quite clearly the white fat in your arm, the red of the muscle, and white below that in some places that could have easily been bone. You wouldn't have been surprised if it was. A moment later, the body's natural defenses sprang up, blood welling out of the gap in a sickening gush, hot and smelling of copper, like old pennies. It quickly filled the space between the edges in the skin, but there was so much more following.

It welled up onto the skin above the gash, before sliding off the sides of your arm. As you watched, completely numb, it began to splash into the bathwater, staining it first a faint pink with each drop, and as time progressed, a darkening pink.

Without further ado, you repeated the process on your other arm.

The pain was coming in waves, and you closed your eyes. You just wanted to be gone from this world. This needed to hurry up. Your arms fell into the tub with a splash, and you nearly pulled them back out in pain, but what was the point?

Cracking your eyes open, you could see that the water was a nice reddish color now. Perfect.

Just as you were drifting off, you heard the front door opening as if from a distance. There was only one other person who had a key to this place. The same person who had driven you to this. You heard his voice, calling your name.

He said he knew that you were in there, since your car was still outside. That he'd hate to be just dropping in like this, but he'd tried calling you, and it'd gone to voicemail, and he'd left several messages, and he had gotten worried when you never replied.

You heard his footsteps, walking from the living room into the kitchen, then back to the living room, to the balcony, living room, bedroom. Calling out your name. Apologizing, saying he reacted too harshly, that he wanted to talk to you, work things out.

Just as you were losing consciousness, he entered the bathroom. You only managed to gasp out a single apology before darkness took you.

When your eyes opened, it was to bright white lights. Sterile, fluorescent. A quick glance around showed you that you were in the hospital. Your arms were paining you, and looking down, you could see that they were wrapped in gauze from your wrist to your elbow, and you were certain that there were stitches below. Looking at your right hand, you noticed something interesting.

There was another hand's fingers intertwined with yours. Following the hand up to the arm to the body that it belonged to, you realized that maybe he was right. Maybe he did want to work things out.

He noticed that you were awake. He asked you if you were in pain. You shook your head no. It didn't matter. You didn't want to interrupt this moment just for a nurse to give you something for pain that you'd brought upon yourself. He kissed your hand, apologizing for what he had said several days before. He said that he was furious that night, that he wasn't thinking clearly. He said he was sorry that he drove you to this. That he wanted to make it up to you. That he wanted to work things out. That he would help you get help, kick your addiction, and would be there to hold your hand every step of the way.

All you could do was whisper your thanks. If only you had waited another hour, you might've been having this same conversation at home, and everything would've been fine. As it was, however, you still felt that everything would work out fine in the end.

Or would it?

Le gasp! Something with a happy ending for once! From me? Never!

Yes, for once, I took pity on a character in one of my stories and gave them a decent-ish ending. I do what I want! You mad bro?