title credit to daughter by youth
Gabe, Percy decides after a particularly bad night that leaves his whole body aching and burning with every breath, is as terribly horrific as they come. The alcohol and occasional drug don't help, he knows, and he's tried finding solace in that - in knowing that, even if it's just an unrealistic belief he clutches to his chest through sweaty palms and pounding hearts, there was the smallest part of him that hoped Gabe only him when he was drunk. Because he was drunk. Not because Percy screwed up again, or because of the goddamn poker game, or because he didn't clean his fucking mess, but because he was messed up on whatever it was he had managed to get his hands on.
Blaming it on the alcohol Gabe drank like he needed it to survive, Percy something to hope on - something tangible that he could hold onto tightly at a desperate attempt to calm the waging war in his mind. And he had taken that hope - this small, practically nothing - and he had kept it with him through bruised jaws and crude insults and bleeding ribs that he pretended didn't bother him - and he held onto it with a vice-like grip.
But the sickening reality that Percy tried so desperately to run from had caught up with him and ripped away his hope harder than Gabe ever could and had beat it and raked it through the mud and had left it there to die, leaving Percy with nothing but scattered ashes of a dead thing and a distinguished flame that had burned in his chest. The flame that was so dull, it had almost been nothing - being doused and blown out countless times with every realization that his dad would never come back and he had left him and every time he was kicked out of another school and every time he had realized he only made his mom's life harder and that there was something wrong with him did that to you.
This kind of stuff didn't happen to anybody else he knew and Gabe's words he sometimes said to Percy - it's all your fault, you should've done better, if you had only done what you were supposed to, this wouldn't have happened - cut through him worse than any bottle. It left him trembling on the cold floor, unable to get up, and it hurt. It hurt more than any of Gabe's punches or the knowledge that his dad didn't care and never would, or the eviction notes his mom thought she kept hidden from him. It seeps through him as if he's got cracks in his skin - as if he's broken - and it eats away at his insides like a disease he can't get rid of.
But it's not. Because if it was a disease, that'd give Percy something to know and to decipher. Something real and graspable and something he could fight. Not something temperamental that blamed you or forced you to face the truth - that it was Percy's fault, that he was good for nothing, and that he was a waste of space - and it'd give him something he could challenge. How do you fight against something when that something is your mind? You couldn't touch it, you couldn't confront it, or harm it, you could only momentarily hope to silence it, and pray for the best.
Percy's not sure when he's started doing it - maybe during the sleepless nights he's not quite ready to admit to himself is insomnia, when his brain and the silence and the excruciating pain keep him from dreaming, or during the days when getting away, even if there would be a harsh punishment for it later, seems easier then having to deal with anyone, or during the nights when Gabe was finally passed out on the couch and his mom was at work because she's always taking double shifts so he never sees her, when the quiet is too much and he's completely alone and just wants to be done with everything, he's not sure - but he finds comfort on the roof.
The trailer he currently lives in is just small enough that he can reach up his arms, stand on his tiptoes, and hoist himself up onto the crumbling surface. When he sits there feeling so close to the moon and the stars and the away and so far from worrying about getting kicked out and Gabe and eviction notices and everything, he feels insignificant against it all. Percy relishes in being unimportant, always has. If he's unimportant, nobody notices him. If he's unimportant he can do what he wants. If he's unimportant, there are no consequences for his actions. If he's insignificant, he's not the only person in the world with problems, and nothing matters.
And there's something else, too, when Percy feels away and close and wanting to leave but he's grounded to the rooftop; he feels almost okay. Kicking his feet back and forth, hands in his lap, staring at the never-ending night sky and feeling like he could maybe, probably be swallowed whole, he wonders what it would be like to jump. He knows he can't - his mom would be stuck with smelly Gabe and he can't have that - and, even if he could, realistically the only thing he'd do is a break a bone or two, but it's hard not to wonder what it'd feel like to be free like that. Whether he'd go to heaven or hell or Neverland or stay roaming around the Earth, a mindless ghost with no home, he's not sure, but he doesn't think any of those options would be too bad.