#33 Chase cuts. No het. Gen or slash are okay.
Blood holds no mystery for Robert Chase. He's had it coughed on him, had it seep into his clothes from open wounds as he helps lift a patient onto a bed in the ICU, had it run over his hands as he slices into a patient's throat. He's been wrist deep in it while his hands rummage around in someone's insides.
He watches as the porcelain white of his sink slowly turns deep red, and wonders why some people find blood so fascinating.
He slumps back against the wall and slides down, dropping the shiny-silver scalpel onto the tiles beside him. He ignores the dizziness, knowing that it'll pass, and wonders if he's overdone it more than usual this time. He turns his hands over and examines the marks, far enough up his arms to be out of sight and not look so suspicious, and decides he can't be bothered with a tourniquet. It'll stop on its own.
He feels drunk, his motions a little too slow, his head rolling lazily from side to side, and he laughs because of the absurdity of it all.
He stops laughing because the echoes of his voice bouncing off the stylishly-decorated walls sounds just a little too raw for his liking.
He wonders sometimes what it would be like to die. To press the blade just a little deeper, to watch as the functions designed to keep his body going slowly kill him, pushing bright red, oxygenated blood out of his skin. He hates that he knows how long it'd take him to die, and how long he could wait before saving him would be impossible. He likes that it's warm, and if he closes his eyes he can imagine that he's ten again, on a beach with his mother laughing as he shows off something he's caught, warm, Australian seawater trickling down his forearms and making little holes in the sand as it drips off him.
It amuses him, in a dark way, to try and rationalise what he does to himself. He likes the sound of the hollow excuses that fall off his tongue when Cameron sees the tail end of a new scar sticking out from under his rolled-up shirtsleeves, and he just feels tired when he realises how good a liar he's become. He wonders how she missed them when they fucked, the ones on his arms and the ones climbing ladder-like up the insides of his calves.
He decides he doesn't care.
He doesn't cut himself when he loses a patient, because it feels perversely like he'd be rewarding himself if he did.
He cut himself in the ICU once, only once, and he's grateful that the nurses and other doctors present consider him normal enough to convince themselves that the scalpel he stuck in his arm was an accident.
Sometimes he sits in his bathroom, in the modern, chrome-and-glass shower, and cuts and cuts until the voices go away and he feels in control of himself again. He doesn't do it because he's sad, he knows that. It's part of the reason he doesn't want anyone else to know about what he does to himself – he doesn't need pity, or help, or anything they could offer him. He needs to know that, in the end, he decides whether he lives or dies. He can control that aspect of his life, at least. He couldn't save his mother, couldn't save his father, couldn't save his ability to love or his sanity, had his control wrenched away in the most brutal manner.
But he can control this, and every cut is a reminder that yes, he is a person.
Sometimes he forgets.
He knows, in a detached sort of way, that he's really fucked up, but he can't quite bring himself to care, and he stops smiling because he can't make it look real any more.
He hopes that maybe next time he'll press just a little harder, dig a little deeper, and he won't have to worry any more about whether his mask is beginning to crack.
It doesn't hurt.