A/N : See this? This is a BRIGHT FLASHING TRIGGER WARNING SIGN. if you are triggered by this, please seek the help you need.
Reader prompt for Inavia who wanted to see how Wanda feels about her brother's self-harming.
1.
The lava lamp on the table is casting morphing, ghostly patterns over the room, for once all the electronics turned off and quiet, hardly light enough to see by, but she knows her way down here. She can move quietly and quickly without tripping over any of the stuff Peter leaves around, slip to the side of the bed, sit down cautiously. The mattress sinks under her weight, soft and downy, her twin doesn't stir.
She strokes away the fronds of feathery silver falling over his closed eyes with a finger, sees that beneath the papery skin his eyes are flickering rapidly with dreams. Hopes that they are good ones. Knows that they are not. She should have told their mother like she'd threatened to, should have done more than shout and thump him and take the blade out of his hands. Coming on him unawares with his headphones on turned up too loud bent intently over something in his lap, approaching curiously to see what he was doing. He had looked faraway and trancelike, watching intently whilst the blade drew another bright line behind it over the soft, vulnerable skin of his inner wrist. So much blood, pattering over his baggy black jeans that like all his clothes are far too big for him. Running down into the deep hollow in his elbow. Staining the fingertips that hold the blade like the juice of wild berries.
His eyes are wide and frightened when she screams at him, an animal frozen in the headlights of an oncoming truck. He'd thought she had accompanied her mother to the store, thought he was alone in the house. Thought nobody would catch him. He was wrong.
He lied, she knew that. Told her it was the first time when she could see the pinkish-purple of closed wounds under the rivulets of his blood. Sat silent and shaking whilst she fetched the first-aid kit and gently wrapped gauze bandages over the fresh wounds, tight-lipped in her terrified fury. Swore that he never would again and put his bandaged arms around her and sobbed, all gasping tears and snot and remorse, against her hair and begged her not to tell their mother. She had not.
The wounds were like little raw mouths, gaping in his skin and weeping blood, pouring out the turmoil and the pain and the things he couldn't put into comprehensible words, gushing out the demons that haunted him, the things he couldn't tell his mother, his twin sister, himself, that were bigger than himself and needed to be purged from his tiny, frail body before they devoured him. She wants to kiss every tiny screaming mouth on their wet lips and silence them forever, take his pain away and let him get some rest. Wants to hurt him worse than he has hurt himself, feels sick and furious and helpless and so, so sad that there is nothing she can do.
He tries to tell them. Tries to express in words how crazy and tiny and stupid and wretched he feels, but his mouth tries to keep up with his mind and the words tumble over each other, tying his tongue in knots. He cannot make them understand, because they can't hear the individual words when they pour out of him in a whitewater gush of emotional chaos. They try, but they can't, and he cannot slow down for them. They understand that the past two years have been frightening and harrowing for him, that he has been terrified and fighting for his life against an illness nobody could diagnose. He cannot make them understand that now that he is beginning to feel better, to regain his strength and fill out a little, what it has all done to his mind has left him crippled and in psychological agony. They all try, but it can't be done.
She takes her twin on her lap as though he were their baby sister, clutches him to her and rocks him gently. His legs were long and bony, hanging limply off her lap, Converse sneakers dragging on the carpet, she can hear the shhh shhh shhh as his toes move through the pile with the motion of his wracking sobs. Hear his heartbeat, rapid and uneven and desperate, hear his too-fast breath rasping hot and wet and ragged against her neck. His tears are wet on her collar. She hates him so fiercely for doing this, for being unable to confide in her. Loves him just as hard, and wants only to hold him and rock him and let him cry in her hair and pour his agony out in salt-water less precious than his lifeblood. Can feel his guts clenching in spasms of hunger but knows he cannot eat yet, that he is crying too hard and will only vomit anything straight back up. She will make sure he eats later, when he has purged himself of some of this pain. Something sweet and comforting, but not yet. She does not understand why he would do this, why he would hurt himself when there was already so much that hurt. She understands perfectly that he feels he has no other valve to release the pressure.
He cries himself to exhaustion, falling limp and twitching against her body, his breath thick with his tears and barely slowed in unhappy sleep. She sits rocking him whilst darkness falls and she hears her mother return from the store and calls back to her that they were fine and holds her brother and does not feel fine at all. Tucks her hands around the protruding cage of bones in his chest and runs her thumb along the heaving ribs, gently, slowly, soothingly. Wonders if she is soothing him or herself. Lifts the insignificant weight of him and hears her knees crack from long stillness, carries him like a child to his bed, slips off his sneakers and pulls the heavy covers over him. So small, so vulnerable and fragile under her hands. Heart like a trapped bird fluttering against the cage of his ribs, frantically seeking escape, breath hitching in his chest and exhaled still hot and salt. Closed eyes so puffy and raw and painted with purple shadows. He still doesn't sleep enough, though it has gotten better recently. He sleeps a couple of hours a night. Wanda knows he wakes in terror from nightmares more often than not. She rests her hand over the hard peak of his hip, wonders if there would ever come a time when she could not see her brother's bones, when he would not be so ill and frail, when the childlike beauty of his face would not be ruined by the hollowness of his cheeks or the sickly pallor of his skin. When his huge dark eyes would not look wet with tears and alive with a madness he could not live with.
He curls his arms to his face, a little boy in teenager's skin, overlong sleeves pulled tight over his bare-branch fingers, the tips poking out. She sees a little blood she had missed lurking under his nails, feels sad and angry and frightened all over again as she thinks of the bulky blood-soaked bandages under the sleeves. Wants to stop him. Does not want to stop him if this is how he can live. Climbs into the bed with him and pulls the delicate body against her tightly. When their mother came to find her, she would see them there and assume that Peter had not felt well, that Wanda had climbed in to hold him whilst he dealt with the acid-burn pain in his bones he still had from time to time or the churning nausea in his gut, had fallen asleep. She would leave her twins there, not realising the truth. He had been getting better, but things were still tough sometimes.
She wouldn't want to wake her brave children, curled together though both were teenagers now and it was possibly not quite appropriate for them to cuddle up in bed together anymore. Would turn off the lava lamp and leave them in darkness until Peter would stir again. Perhaps stoop to kiss them each on the forehead before she left. Assume that Wanda would have encouraged her brother to eat supper before he slept and leave them.
Wanda will rise only briefly to go to her bedroom, tiptoe past her mother's door. Collect the threadbare stuffed elephant she has slept with every night of her life. Return to the basement and place it carefully in Peter's arms. Settle again beside him.
This was her own form of hurting herself, Wanda thinks. Scoops a hand into the small of her brother's back and pulls him close against her. The dig of his pointed hips is a dull needle against her belly, her fingers running over his vertebrae a reminder of his frailty. Staying here, holding him, keeping his secret and not doing what she knew was right – telling their mother, stopping him – this is her way of causing herself pain. It would leave no scar, there was no blood to clean up, but it was harm nonetheless to stay and to dwell and to feel the agony that radiated out of her poor twin's mind. Wanda isn't psychic, but she has been by her brother's side all his life, and she knows him as nobody would ever know him, can feel when he hurt and when he was confused and frightened. Absorbs that fear and agony and lets it sting her too. It is all she can do for him, to try to share the agony he is in.
She is so afraid for him, for herself. For their family. She has spent months terrified he would die, skipped school for weeks to sit with him in his bed and wrap him in soft blankets and put the television shows he liked on though he was too comatose with weakness and exhaustion to watch them with her. Listened to the NG apparatus a doctor had insisted he use when swallowing became more effort than he could make hissing and clicking through the long silent hours. She had been petrified all that time, heartened when he had begun to improve, clawed himself back from that edge by his fingernails. Now she feared she would lose him another way. That they would take her obviously insane twin away from her and put him in a small room where he couldn't hurt himself. That he wouldn't stop one day when she wasn't there to catch him and would die by his own hand. She feared that was what he wanted, that she was selfish to keep him alive when his life was torment and crazy thoughts he could not catch. She lets herself cry for him, for herself, but only when he cannot see it.
This would be the last time she hurt herself this way, she promised to the half-dark room. Next time, she would tell their mother. Would not dress his wounds but would show them gaping and screaming to the woman who had given her life to them. Would drag and carry him if she had to, and would take that final blow of hurt as he looked at her betrayed and angry. But no more, after that. She wouldn't hurt herself like this any longer.
