A/N: This chapter heavily references the prequel fic One Foot in Front of the Other, and it might be a little confusing if you haven't ready that one already.
Chapter 7
The drive home from Summer's typically took Seth about nine minutes, but it took a little bit longer when he opted for the scenic route, and a little bit longer than that when he needed to pull off to the side of the road for a bout of brief yet forceful vomiting.
There's a good ten minutes there too, much of it spent on his hands and knees on the lip of a dirt embankment, feeling the last droplets of his vomit clinging to his lips and attempting in vain to flick and spit them down into the darkness, where Seth's not so sure he'll be able to get himself the rest of the way home.
So he's thankful now, as he turns the key in the ignition and turns off the hazard lights and first hits the right blinker on before realizing his mistake and hitting the left one on, thankful that he didn't have to do anything so mortifying as calling his dad to come pick him up from the side of the road, all of a four minute drive from home.
He's pretty sure he's got this, anyway.
And by got this, he means that he's effectively sealed off and away whatever part of him was fully aware of what he'd just done.
Would Dr. Max call this progress?
He wipes the corner of his mouth with the cuff of his sleeve and slowly eases the Range Rover back onto the road, loose gravel crunching underneath the tires.
He imagines little pebbles flinging every which way, some making it down the embankment and mingling with the remnants of his pad Thai, some skittering to a stop on the road, destined to be crunched under other tires heading other places.
It's probably a good thing that he doesn't know where Dr. Max lives.
Seth can't remember ever actively wanting to go therapy, but there's a non-zero chance he'd be yelling incoherently on Dr. Max's front lawn at the moment, if he only knew where said lawn was located.
But that's not all of him, and he manages to be thankful for that too, that his hands can grip the steering wheel and that his foot can work the pedals and that he can feel a distant detached kind of disgust for whoever that was, that Trainwreck Kid, who was just barfing down a hill because he was a fucking idiot who couldn't keep his mouth shut and go home and leave well enough alone.
So it's like he's split in two, one half of him eerily calm and the other half free-falling so hard that he can't grasp onto a single solid foothold.
But being fragmented into a shifting number of pieces is nothing new for him, and he's had years of practice banishing the Trainwreck Kid to somewhere in unreality, all of that kid's thoughts and feelings and what he did and what was done to him turning into Things That Had Obviously Never Happened and Things That He Should Obviously Shut Up About.
There are many days that Seth doesn't ever want to relive, but the day his dad found out about The Trauma is right up there.
His dad found out-Seth didn't tell him.
People probably wouldn't understand why that distinction mattered so much, but it did.
He always corrected people when they said he'd told-mostly in his head, but he corrected them all the same.
He didn't tell his dad.
He never would've told his dad.
He never would've told anyone.
What actually happened is that he fucked up and he lost his normally rock solid grip on the Trainwreck Kid.
It started with just a moment-caught off-guard after years of vigilance-but once the Trainwreck Kid had gotten out, he kept fighting to make his existence known.
They'd had something of a decent working relationship before that, the Trainwreck Kid huddled quietly in the dark somewhere and Seth living their life for the both of them: going to school and coming home and filling the time in between that with comic books and video games and staring off into space and imagining that he was in a comic book or a video game.
He'd really had no idea that the Trainwreck Kid had just been biding his time there in the dark, waiting for an opportunity to make a break for it.
If Seth had just kept him in-line, had gotten through dinner with his parents without breaking character, no one would have noticed a thing. He would've hugged Steven at the airport and sat next to him at dinners and wondered how often he could beg off social and/or family events citing a stomachache before someone got suspicious. He could practically hear his mother scolding him for trying to fake sick his way out of yet another Newpsie party while his dad gave him some dull speech about putting himself out there and making friends rather than hiding from all the kids that hated him, when really all the kids who hated him were rank amateurs in comparison to what he was really hiding from.
Seth knows that Dr. Max would say that going to school the next morning and immediately beating the shit out of the biggest kid he could find was like, Seth's cry for help and his telling, but that was just some wishful thinking therapist spin to try to empower him or make him feel brave or something stupid like that.
What actually happened there was that Seth had been granted a few more hours of freedom, and he'd chosen to use that brief window of time to try to destroy someone else on his way down.
And he couldn't even manage that.
He'd left Chip a sobbing and bloody mess, but the guy survived and his face healed, like nothing had ever happened at all.
It probably didn't even register as a Trauma in his life.
Seth wasn't telling anyone anything, and pummeling Chip wasn't him acting so out-of-character that it forced the people in his life to demand to know what was wrong, no matter what Dr. Max hoped he'd be stupid enough to believe.
Back up against the wall, Seth wasn't going to do anything to stop him.
Back up against the wall, he would have let it happen again.
As it turned out, you couldn't really unknow a thing like that about yourself.
And if Steven had felt betrayed by the Trainwreck Kid's performance at the dinner table and the subsequent seeds of suspicion it had apparently planted in Seth's dad's mind, well, Seth could relate to that particular grievance.
oooooooooooooo
After the Trainwreck Kid made his appearance at dinner and then torn through Seth's closet wondering if he should pack a bag, and then collapsed on Seth's bedroom floor to struggle and gasp for air because what was he supposed to pack and where was he supposed to go, Seth had woken up the following morning and felt it best to go about his fifth grade life as normally as possible.
Re-cage the Trainwreck, let him recede into the dark, go to school, come home, fill the spaces in between with white noise, do it again and again and again.
There was no other plan, and there was no way out, and he'd found that the best thing to do when there was no other plan and no way out was to sink to the bottom of the pool and accept his lot in life.
It had worked for the past four years, and it would work again.
What else was there?
When Chip approached him in the cafeteria, saying something-he doesn't know that he ever knew what-and slapping the lunch tray out of his hands, an act he'd done seemingly countless times without anything in the way of a Seth Cohen Act of Retribution, Seth admittedly wasn't thinking about destroying anyone or ruining Chip's perfectly symmetrical and perfectly socially acceptable Anglo-Saxon features.
He was thinking that there was no plan and no way out and Steven was coming back and it was all going to start again.
All day long on that loop.
And he tried to just let go of himself, let himself sink to the deepest darkest depths, let the problem of Steven be the Trainwreck Kid's to reckon with, but some part of him-maybe the Trainwreck Kid, maybe somebody else-insisted on struggling against the lot in life that Seth knew belonged to him, insisted on desperately treading water when he was trying with everything else in him to make himself go numb.
It was strange and panic-inducing too, to think that Summer had probably borne witness to the fight, had probably sat in the cafeteria and watched Seth pummel Chip, had maybe been one of the kids who had taken to calling him Psychohen for a few months, until they all realized that Seth was still a wuss and realized that his violent outburst had just been some one-off or some bizarre performance art piece or some momentary demonic possession, and then the dust settled and Seth managed to disappear into the wallpaper again, middle school order fully restored.
There was always that fear lingering in the edges of his mind that one day Summer would remember too much.
Usually it was stupid stuff, some unlocked memory of Seth getting shoved into a locker or destroyed in dodgeball, but the fight was a whole other thing.
She probably saw him launch himself at Chip, probably heard him yell unintelligibly and at the top of his lungs, probably watched his arms swing and his legs kick wildly, the weird quiet kid suddenly feral, and she probably saw some teacher grab him by the waist and pull him away from Chip's prone body, still yelling and still flailing and still feral.
Mr. Stanley.
It had been Mr. Stanley, the PE teacher, who had grabbed him.
Seth had tried to forget the frantic trapped feeling of the arms clamping around his midsection as he was carted off to the principal's office, but he dimly remembers sitting on the carpet, trusty pool of vomit at his side, and hearing a deep masculine voice from the other room.
"I didn't know the little guy had it in him." It was spoken with a hint of a chuckle.
Leave it to Seth to be crashing and burning in spectacular and violent and bloody fashion while simultaneously finally earning the respect of his PE teacher.
It was strange too, how the world didn't end when you did a thing like maul another fifth grader, that a teacher could be laughing about it a minute later, while Chip's face was still gushing blood all over the cafeteria floor.
But then, the world didn't end when a lot of things happened.
There was so much that never really made sense to Seth, that felt stupid and barbaric and incomprehensible.
And when Seth went home that day, he'd taken a page out of the Trainwreck Kid's handbook, hiding in the dark of his closet, ready to stay there all night if that was what it took to get where he needed to be, to come to accept his lot in life with the kind of impassivity he'd honed after years of mute torment.
But then his dad came along and invaded the dark and the quiet and ruined that plan for him.
Seth knows he's supposed to think of that as a rescue mission, but some days it felt more like another betrayal, if he was honest.
He'd meant it when he'd said that he wanted to die when he thought about it. And he wanted to die that anyone knew about it, had never really stopped wanting to die that anyone knew about it.
Everyone said he was so brave for telling and it was so great that he told, but they didn't understand that he never actually told, that he would've rather killed himself, that he well understood the impulse to blow up a bus full of people or otherwise dispense with anyone who got between him and his ability to hide.
Seth slows to a stop at a stop sign.
There's some kind of grating clicking noise that's been setting his teeth on the edge this whole time, but he can't seem to apply his brain to the task of figuring out the source.
He squints, looking around.
There's a blinking light on the dash.
It's shaped like an arrow.
Seth's brow furrows further, confused as his brain clumsily attempts to mash a few disparate pieces together.
The turn signal was still on.
He'd never turned it off.
He reaches out and flicks it off.
Apparently he'd held the keys to that particular prison the whole time.
Seth bites down hard on his lip and slowly presses his foot onto the gas pedal.
Only a minute until home.