'It's fine.'
It's normal. It's almost impossible to see a swollen, full pimple, ready to burst, and not just pop it.
Yuu presses the tweezers against his pores, unyielding and unkindly. He couldn't feel the sting until he pulled away, tiny sebacious filaments building up on the side of the tiny metal tongs.
Scabs itch. Anyone who said that they'd never ever ripped one off and let it start bleeding all over, well they were a probably a liar.
When satisfied his pores had been sufficiently scoured, Yuu rinsed the tweezers and wiped a pad across the surface to clean it. The scent of TCP was overwhelming, he hated it, but he hated infections more.
His nose was red, splotchy and sore and the skin felt tight, stretched out. The tiniest dab of blood could be seen and Yuu leaned closer to inspect it, his breath misting the bathroom mirror.
Maybe...
Maybe he wasn't quite done.
He picked the tweezers back up and dug it into his skin again, just to make sure, just to double check that he'd cleaned everything out. Another fifteen minutes.
He checked is face from different angles, ran his fingertips over either cheek, lightly trailing his jaw. He used his short nails to squeeze and pull and pick at any irregularity, anything that wasn't smooth.
But when his fingers ran over the same patch a second time, tiny bumps now slightly swelled with the irritation, it demanded to be fixed even more thoroughly. His neck and arms ached from the angle, and when that switch in Yuu's head finally decided 'Yeah, okay that's enough for today,' He looked own and caught sight of his bare chest, littered with tiny little scabs from squeezing and pinching the pores and hair follicales, to get those little collections of grossness out of his skin.
Calmly, methodically, he set about pulling each little scab away. To make his skin smooth, to make it clear.
The process continued, down his arms.
God, his arms were awful. Each tiny bump squeezed out, every hair follicle pinched and pinched and pinched with his nails, trying to get rid of it.
A couple of them started to bleed. The tiny hairs that refused to move, rooted in red and raw and sore and bloody skin, Yuu picked up the black, silver tipped tweezers again and ripped them right out.
'That'll show you,' Was an aggressive passing thought at his body.
If it wasn't growing to grow correctly, if it was going to grow with bumps and imperfections and tiny little holes that got clogged up, than he was going to fix it himself.
He gave his body another dangerous once over (What if he saw something else? What if he'd missed something? He'd need to check every inch all over again) and grew frustrated at what he saw.
There were bumps, so he squeezed out the contents to be rid of them, but instead they swelled with irritation. He picked off the scabs because he couldn't stand the rough, raised texture, but they just bled more, and they'd dry, even larger than before. What had been a tiny scab over a pore he'd squeezed to hard was now thumbnail sized because he couldn't leave it alone.
And everywhere, everywhere, his skin was still botched with red patches, angry at him for such cruel, (but so necessary) treatment.
His mother knocked on the bathroom door.
He was late for school again.
"You've been in there for hours!" She jokingly called through, and told him that Tanaka was at the door.
Yuu frowned. It might have been a joke, but it probably had been an hour at least.
And he still wasn't dressed.
This was originally intended as an Asanoya multi-chaptered fic, but as it stands I just don't have the motivation to continue it as a multi-chaptered story, so this is staying as a standalone for now. In the future if it recieves enough interest I'll continue it.
Dermatillomania is the obsessive compulsive disorder in which a sufferer feels compelled to pick, scratch, gauge or squeeze at their own skin. It is an involuntary behaivour and is NOT a self harm behaivour, even if it is self destructive, because the disorder is obsessive compulsive, meaning the sufferer as no control over their actions, even if they're aware of it. I suffer from this myself