When the sun goes down, Dan is empty. Emotionless and numb as he stares at his chilled white walls, he dreams about silver blades dragging across his barely-recovered wrists.
To him, his arms were a battlefield and he wasn't quite sure if he was going to survive the war. Beaten and bloody, insecure and scared he cries out even though there's no one to listen. Alone and feigning confidence, he faces his demons head on but always walks away broken and hurt but remembers to wear a smile. It's convincing, it is, but there are always souls that bring up his battle scars and that's when he backs away. While the sun is looming over the trees, he can only think about his time fighting. As the sky turns a deep crimson, reality catches up with him and he's watching the rivers of red dripping from his skin and pooling below him, but he can't afford to care.
When the moon rises up his self-esteem plummets, he doesn't have the energy to move let alone think, so he lets it happen. The blood that spills had become routine, he's losing himself but he won't care because he's stronger than that. He doesn't need help. He's fine.
No one notices how prominent his hipbones are becoming as they're too busy obsessing over something that one celebrity did or who broke up and got back together with who. And when a soldier goes down fighting, no one expects it.
Or rather, no one was paying attention.
Phil, the only person that keeps him breathing. He tries to help, and for a while Dan was starting to think that it was working, that he was recovering — but he's not an optimist. Even for an optimist, that'd be far-fetched. Dan's already too far gone to be pulled back to shore.
Dan expresses depression in the form of a metaphor: swimming. Everyone in the world floating above the surface until the waves start getting bigger and more aggressive, pushing you under farther and farther while you watch the others hover above. They watch your lungs fill with bitter saltwater, and while you're thrashing around in a useless attempt to rise over the water they don't react until it's too late.
Phil thinks that Dan overthinks things.
Dan doesn't deny it, because he does, but it isn't his fault. Laying on your back in a bedroom that doesn't even feel like your own with a mind-numbing case of insomnia drives you to think. And thinking leads to becoming emotional, but Dan is an exception. He pushes his feelings away, keeping them bottled up and hid away.
When the sun goes down, Dan is scared. A child, afraid of the dark and whatever monsters infest it, an illusion of morphed faces that won't go away until dealt with. The only difference is that the monsters are scarier and most importantly — real.
Dan may overthink, his opinion on a little bit of everything changing every night, but he's sure of one thing; he loves Phil. Phil, however, probably doesn't love him back.
Who could love someone with scars?
This thought, the one that he hates even more than he hates himself, is the most common.
Fucking stupid mind, thinking fucking stupid things in the middle of the fucking night.
Fuck.
Dan, the boy who is dazed and confused, poised but unstable, is debating something. A war with himself that's much more serious and permanent than the battle atop his arms. His heart is pounding in his ears as he slowly stands on the soft, but blood-stained carpet. Behind his mind's eye, he sees Phil. Freezing with his hand resting on the doorknob, he almost backs out. Almost.
When the sun goes down, the boy finally cracks. Silent tears and a searing pain in his chest, his thoughts race so fast he can barely keep up.
Staggering to the bathroom, light-headed from not eating at all in the last four days, his hand fumbles with a certain bottle that he considers opening a lot. He takes a look at himself in the dirty mirror; eyes sunken in, his hair dying slowing from tip to root, his cheekbones looking sharp under the dull light.
He pauses, the pills in hand, and just sighs.
With one last thought, he cautiously brings them to his lips before tilting his head back and swallowing all of them with a drink of water from the sink.
He doesn't bother writing a note, there's nothing to say.
He collapses, but he's emotionless again.
Can't afford to care anymore.
When the sun goes down, Dan is nothing but a kid with a bottle of pills and a few battle scars.