203
but not more medicine
chatroom (jim/william)
2,248 words. hard r. au from the movie, in which will's father never catches him texting, he comes to his senses, and isn't any less fucked up for it. written at the behest of strikesoftly and wishpaper, for whom I'd write almost anything.
Will is looking at his mother when his mobile dings in his pocket. He turns away enough to glance at it, and slides it back into his pocket. His father would be livid if he saw it.
“Mum?” He pitches his voice loudly enough that she looks at him, a soft smile crossing her face. Will’s heart clenches. His father is looking away, into the garden, and Ripley is chatting up their mother’s agent. “I’m going to go inside for a moment, use the loo. Don’t worry about me, yeah?”
She reaches out to touch his face, and says, “Of course, sweetheart.” Her fingers are soft, no calluses. Will manages half a smile, and then pulls away.
He wonders how long the peace is going to last.
“Jim?” Will knows that Jim is in the chat, but he’s not answering. “Jim, come on.” Jim is facing the TV, but Will can’t see what he’s watching - he could hack it, if he wanted, but he’s not here for that. Not anymore. “Jim.”
“Sorry,” Jim says, and his face is tearstained, pale and thin and wan. And Will did that to him.
“It’s me, I’m the one -” Will cuts himself off, and takes a deep breath, to regroup. He doesn’t have the much time. His mother will wonder where he’s gone. Or he hopes that she will.
“Will?” Jim’s uncertain now, thin knees pulled up to his chest, long fingers white-knuckled around them.
“I’m the one who should be sorry, Jim,” Will says. “I haven’t got much time, can we - would you meet with me?”
The TV is throwing flicking lights onto Jim’s face, but Will still can’t see the film - Jim’s old home movies, or the Japanese girl jumping from the window. Something in Will’s stomach twists at the thought.
“Yeah, okay,” Jim says.
They meet by the penguins, right where Jim last saw his dad. Jim has his jumper pulled down over his fingers, and one of his knees is bouncing with his nerves. Will sits on the other end of the bench but doesn’t look at him, his hood pulled over his ears. Jim glances at him a few times before he says anything.
“W-Will?” Jim asks, both hands folded into his lap like origami cranes.
“Yeah,” Will says, finally, and he can hear Jim’s slow, relieved exhale. When he speaks, it’s that relief that makes him do it. “Look. Jim, I’m not - I’m not a good person.”
“Wha - what do you mean?” If Will looks out of the corner of his eyes, he can see a few of the curls that hang in his face, and Jim’s profile - his bitten lips, his pale white cheeks.
“You - when I met you, in the chat, you reminded me of myself. And I hated that, more than, more than, uh, almost anything. I wanted to destroy you, like I couldn’t - like I wasn’t brave enough to do myself, and. That was wrong. And I’m sorry.” Will says the whole thing to his hands, to the dirt underneath his fingernails. He’s always known that he’s wrong, that there is something wrong with him, but this is further than he ever thought he’d be prepared to go.
“You - you’re not a very happy person, are you, Will?”
Will’s laugh sounds closer to a sob. “Never have been, no.”
“I suppose that makes two of us,” Jim says, and when Will glances over at him, there’s the barest hint of a smile on his face.
“None of this is your fault, you know,” Will says, like he can’t help it. Jim looks almost whole when he smiles. Delicate and beautiful, but not broken. “Not one bit, none of it.”
Jim leans in, quick like a striking bird, and kisses Will on the cheek, just at the corner of his mouth.
“Thank you,” Jim says, “for telling me.”
Will swallows and touches his cheek. He nods.
Will doesn’t talk to Eva or Mo or Emily after that, though he’s not sure if Jim does or not. He doesn’t ask. They meet a few more times, and they talk, and they don’t talk, and Will starts to wonder if Jim is really anywhere near as weak as Will is. Will, who is brittle and cold and sullen at dinner, whose parents still haven’t returned his computer, who wants to take a knife to something every time his father gives him that disappointed look.
He’s not sure if he’d cut himself or his father, so he just spins the knife around on his fingers, and then texts Jim to see if he’ll come over.
The second time, Will is the one who kisses Jim, cupping both his cheeks and leaning in. Will’s bedroom door is closed but not locked, and his parents are downstairs in the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner, or talking to Ripley on the phone, or sharing a nightcap. Will straddles Jim’s hips and presses him back into the thick comforter, kissing him soft and chaste on the mouth, over and over. Jim lets him.
“Do you ever want to hurt yourself?” Will asks, lips pressed to the curve of Jim’s jaw, whispering his secrets into Jim’s soft skin.
“Yes,” Jim says. “All the time.” His eyelids flutter when Will bites into his jaw, gentle, gentle.
“Do you ever want someone else to hurt you?” Will licks at the skin that he’s sunk he teeth into, and Jim’s hands come up to clutch at his back, fingers grasping at his hoodie.
“Yes, yeah, that too.” Jim’s voice is a whisper, but Will is close enough to hear everything he says, and every breath that shudders out of him when Will touches him.
“Me too,” Will says, like a confession, like he’s baring the scars on his arms for Jim to see, and he would, he will, but not right now. Jim makes a noise in the back of his throat, almost wounded, and slots their mouths together. Their tongues touch, and Will can’t breathe, and he doesn’t want to, anyway.
Will’s mother smiles at him and asks how he met his nice new friend. Will could tell half a lie and say they met through therapy, but he doesn’t. He says they met online, though he keeps the specifics vague. She makes a face at the mention of the internet, halfway between distaste and worry, but she likes Jim, and so she doesn’t say anything.
“I want to try something,” Will says, when he is walking with Jim past the Chalk Farm tube station. They aren’t anywhere near Will’s parents house, though they’re pretty close to Jim’s. “Will you let me?”
Jim looks at Will, knowing, but he just says, “Okay. Let’s go back to mine. Mum won’t be back for a few hours yet.”
In Jim’s room, Jim locks the door while Will pulls his hoodie and his t-shirt over his head in one smooth motion. He
pulls the knife out of his back pocket and flips it open.
Jim gasps, somewhere behind him, but when Will turns, Jim has taken a step forward, eyes fixed on the blade.
“Please,” Will says. He can’t get anything else out; he doesn’t know how to ask. He just wants.
“Yeah,” Jim says. “Okay.”
The first cut is too deep, across Will’s ribs, and it bleeds. It bleeds more than Will was expecting, but when Jim apologizes, Will just wraps a hand around his wrist and pulls him back down.
Jim kisses the skin around the cut, above and below, and licks a little of the blood away, where it’s trickling down Will’s side and dripping onto the sheets. Will can feel the skin pull every time he breathes and it’s perfect. Exactly what he wanted.
The second cut is on the other side, shallower and longer and it still bleeds, but Jim fastens his mouth to it and sucks, and Will moans. It’s not even that he likes the pain it’s that he craves it. Jim lines the third cut half an inch above the second, and the forth goes just below. Will is writhing, leaving bloody fingerprints on the nice white sheets, and Jim wraps his mouth around Will’s left nipple and pushes his fingers against the cuts and Will’s head snaps back, hips pushing up. He’s panting for air.
When Jim kisses him on the mouth, his saliva still tastes like salt and metal, and his bloody fingers leave trails on Will’s skin. He’s discarded the knife onto the floor.
“Me next time,” Jim says, later, and Will, still groggy, agrees.
Hours later, Will sits on the toilet while Jim washes each cut with peroxide and tapes them up with gauze. The sheets are ruined, but Will has a reminder every time he breathes that he’s not alone, not anymore, and he’s not the only one who likes to hurt.
The cuts scab over and start to heal. Will spreads Jim out naked on his bed while his parents are at work and takes the knife to his thighs, diligent and careful. He feels some vindication for how neat and even they are; he’s done this before, it’s obvious. Jim shudders and arches and whimpers, his hair clumped against his forehead with sweat.
“Oh, oh,” he says, high pitched and reedy. His mouth is wet, red and open, tongue pressed against his teeth. Will can’t stop looking at him, how reactive he is to every touch, to every scrape of the blade over his skin.
He even bleeds pretty.
“An - another,” Jim begs, swallowing what is suspiciously close to a sob. Will kisses each cut, one and a time, all the way up both thighs and over Jim’s hips, until his lips are red with blood.
“Shhhh,” he says, pressing his mouth to Jim’s cheek. “You’re okay. Shush.”
Will keeps the sheets in a wad at the bottom of his closet. He can’t let his parents see them and he can’t bear to bin them, so they stay there, crumpled beneath his rolling suitcase. Sometimes, when Jim is entertaining his mother, and Ripley is in the kitchen eating an apple and laughing at their father’s jokes, Will will sit on the floor of his closet and pull out the ruined sheets, his and Jim’s fingerprints in Jim’s blood, the drips and streaks of it. They smell like copper and dust and a little like semen. Will pulls them around his shoulders and lets his head fall back against the wall.
Will throws a glass at his father’s head and storms out of the house. His mother is yelling something, maybe at his father, but Will doesn’t care and he doesn’t look back. He should be wearing a coat to be out in the cold this late, but if he stops than he’ll have time to think, and that is never a good thing this close to his bedroom. There are razors in the bathroom, but he has a knife stashed in his drawer. He pulls the zip of his hoodie up all the way, tugs the hood over his hair, and stuffs his hands in his pockets.
He’s resigned himself to the way that his father sees him - the good-for-nothing fuck-up, the violent miscreant, the bad seed in their good family - but that doesn’t mean he has to like it.
He calls Jim. He doesn’t really have anyone else to call. He’s not sure who else he’d want to call.
“My mum wants me to go back on the pills,” Jim says when he finds Will, shivering, on a bench four blocks away from his house. Jim is wearing a coat and a scarf, his cheeks rosy red from the wind.
“My dad wants to kick me out of the house,” Will says in response.
“You win,” Jim says, a tucks a hand into the crook of Will’s elbow, hauling him to his feet. “You can come to mine, for now. We’ll get you sorted.”
Will should protest, probably, but he’s too fucking tired of everything.
“After you,” he says, and ignores the smile that Jim turns his way.
Jim doesn’t cut him up that night, but Will doesn’t mind because Jim bites down into the sensitive places hard enough to leave Will scrabbling at the sheets. No blood, but deep, yellow and purple bruises on the insides of Will’s arms and thighs, on the curve of belly just below his navel, at the junction between neck and shoulder. Jim bites down and holds on, like he can ground Will with the heat of his mouth, the pressure of his teeth and tongue. Jim’s body settles over him, and Will lets himself go still. Jim pushes the sweaty hair off of his forehead, and kisses him.
Will falls asleep with Jim’s chest against his back, fingers pushing, pushing, pushing against the forming bruises.
In the morning Will goes back to his parents’, and Jim goes with him.
“I’ll go if you want,” Will says, looking not into his father’s eyes, but at the little scab on his jaw where a piece of flying glass may have nicked him. Jim is standing slightly behind Will, and his fingers grab at the back of Will’s hoodie, digging in and holding on. Not restraining, just reassuring. The bruise on Will’s neck is throbbing in time with his pulse, and when he shifts his weight the bites on his inner thighs pull and twinge. Will doesn’t actually care what his father has to say.
chatroom (jim/william)
2,248 words. hard r. au from the movie, in which will's father never catches him texting, he comes to his senses, and isn't any less fucked up for it. written at the behest of strikesoftly and wishpaper, for whom I'd write almost anything.
Will is looking at his mother when his mobile dings in his pocket. He turns away enough to glance at it, and slides it back into his pocket. His father would be livid if he saw it.
“Mum?” He pitches his voice loudly enough that she looks at him, a soft smile crossing her face. Will’s heart clenches. His father is looking away, into the garden, and Ripley is chatting up their mother’s agent. “I’m going to go inside for a moment, use the loo. Don’t worry about me, yeah?”
She reaches out to touch his face, and says, “Of course, sweetheart.” Her fingers are soft, no calluses. Will manages half a smile, and then pulls away.
He wonders how long the peace is going to last.
“Jim?” Will knows that Jim is in the chat, but he’s not answering. “Jim, come on.” Jim is facing the TV, but Will can’t see what he’s watching - he could hack it, if he wanted, but he’s not here for that. Not anymore. “Jim.”
“Sorry,” Jim says, and his face is tearstained, pale and thin and wan. And Will did that to him.
“It’s me, I’m the one -” Will cuts himself off, and takes a deep breath, to regroup. He doesn’t have the much time. His mother will wonder where he’s gone. Or he hopes that she will.
“Will?” Jim’s uncertain now, thin knees pulled up to his chest, long fingers white-knuckled around them.
“I’m the one who should be sorry, Jim,” Will says. “I haven’t got much time, can we - would you meet with me?”
The TV is throwing flicking lights onto Jim’s face, but Will still can’t see the film - Jim’s old home movies, or the Japanese girl jumping from the window. Something in Will’s stomach twists at the thought.
“Yeah, okay,” Jim says.
They meet by the penguins, right where Jim last saw his dad. Jim has his jumper pulled down over his fingers, and one of his knees is bouncing with his nerves. Will sits on the other end of the bench but doesn’t look at him, his hood pulled over his ears. Jim glances at him a few times before he says anything.
“W-Will?” Jim asks, both hands folded into his lap like origami cranes.
“Yeah,” Will says, finally, and he can hear Jim’s slow, relieved exhale. When he speaks, it’s that relief that makes him do it. “Look. Jim, I’m not - I’m not a good person.”
“Wha - what do you mean?” If Will looks out of the corner of his eyes, he can see a few of the curls that hang in his face, and Jim’s profile - his bitten lips, his pale white cheeks.
“You - when I met you, in the chat, you reminded me of myself. And I hated that, more than, more than, uh, almost anything. I wanted to destroy you, like I couldn’t - like I wasn’t brave enough to do myself, and. That was wrong. And I’m sorry.” Will says the whole thing to his hands, to the dirt underneath his fingernails. He’s always known that he’s wrong, that there is something wrong with him, but this is further than he ever thought he’d be prepared to go.
“You - you’re not a very happy person, are you, Will?”
Will’s laugh sounds closer to a sob. “Never have been, no.”
“I suppose that makes two of us,” Jim says, and when Will glances over at him, there’s the barest hint of a smile on his face.
“None of this is your fault, you know,” Will says, like he can’t help it. Jim looks almost whole when he smiles. Delicate and beautiful, but not broken. “Not one bit, none of it.”
Jim leans in, quick like a striking bird, and kisses Will on the cheek, just at the corner of his mouth.
“Thank you,” Jim says, “for telling me.”
Will swallows and touches his cheek. He nods.
Will doesn’t talk to Eva or Mo or Emily after that, though he’s not sure if Jim does or not. He doesn’t ask. They meet a few more times, and they talk, and they don’t talk, and Will starts to wonder if Jim is really anywhere near as weak as Will is. Will, who is brittle and cold and sullen at dinner, whose parents still haven’t returned his computer, who wants to take a knife to something every time his father gives him that disappointed look.
He’s not sure if he’d cut himself or his father, so he just spins the knife around on his fingers, and then texts Jim to see if he’ll come over.
The second time, Will is the one who kisses Jim, cupping both his cheeks and leaning in. Will’s bedroom door is closed but not locked, and his parents are downstairs in the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner, or talking to Ripley on the phone, or sharing a nightcap. Will straddles Jim’s hips and presses him back into the thick comforter, kissing him soft and chaste on the mouth, over and over. Jim lets him.
“Do you ever want to hurt yourself?” Will asks, lips pressed to the curve of Jim’s jaw, whispering his secrets into Jim’s soft skin.
“Yes,” Jim says. “All the time.” His eyelids flutter when Will bites into his jaw, gentle, gentle.
“Do you ever want someone else to hurt you?” Will licks at the skin that he’s sunk he teeth into, and Jim’s hands come up to clutch at his back, fingers grasping at his hoodie.
“Yes, yeah, that too.” Jim’s voice is a whisper, but Will is close enough to hear everything he says, and every breath that shudders out of him when Will touches him.
“Me too,” Will says, like a confession, like he’s baring the scars on his arms for Jim to see, and he would, he will, but not right now. Jim makes a noise in the back of his throat, almost wounded, and slots their mouths together. Their tongues touch, and Will can’t breathe, and he doesn’t want to, anyway.
Will’s mother smiles at him and asks how he met his nice new friend. Will could tell half a lie and say they met through therapy, but he doesn’t. He says they met online, though he keeps the specifics vague. She makes a face at the mention of the internet, halfway between distaste and worry, but she likes Jim, and so she doesn’t say anything.
“I want to try something,” Will says, when he is walking with Jim past the Chalk Farm tube station. They aren’t anywhere near Will’s parents house, though they’re pretty close to Jim’s. “Will you let me?”
Jim looks at Will, knowing, but he just says, “Okay. Let’s go back to mine. Mum won’t be back for a few hours yet.”
In Jim’s room, Jim locks the door while Will pulls his hoodie and his t-shirt over his head in one smooth motion. He
pulls the knife out of his back pocket and flips it open.
Jim gasps, somewhere behind him, but when Will turns, Jim has taken a step forward, eyes fixed on the blade.
“Please,” Will says. He can’t get anything else out; he doesn’t know how to ask. He just wants.
“Yeah,” Jim says. “Okay.”
The first cut is too deep, across Will’s ribs, and it bleeds. It bleeds more than Will was expecting, but when Jim apologizes, Will just wraps a hand around his wrist and pulls him back down.
Jim kisses the skin around the cut, above and below, and licks a little of the blood away, where it’s trickling down Will’s side and dripping onto the sheets. Will can feel the skin pull every time he breathes and it’s perfect. Exactly what he wanted.
The second cut is on the other side, shallower and longer and it still bleeds, but Jim fastens his mouth to it and sucks, and Will moans. It’s not even that he likes the pain it’s that he craves it. Jim lines the third cut half an inch above the second, and the forth goes just below. Will is writhing, leaving bloody fingerprints on the nice white sheets, and Jim wraps his mouth around Will’s left nipple and pushes his fingers against the cuts and Will’s head snaps back, hips pushing up. He’s panting for air.
When Jim kisses him on the mouth, his saliva still tastes like salt and metal, and his bloody fingers leave trails on Will’s skin. He’s discarded the knife onto the floor.
“Me next time,” Jim says, later, and Will, still groggy, agrees.
Hours later, Will sits on the toilet while Jim washes each cut with peroxide and tapes them up with gauze. The sheets are ruined, but Will has a reminder every time he breathes that he’s not alone, not anymore, and he’s not the only one who likes to hurt.
The cuts scab over and start to heal. Will spreads Jim out naked on his bed while his parents are at work and takes the knife to his thighs, diligent and careful. He feels some vindication for how neat and even they are; he’s done this before, it’s obvious. Jim shudders and arches and whimpers, his hair clumped against his forehead with sweat.
“Oh, oh,” he says, high pitched and reedy. His mouth is wet, red and open, tongue pressed against his teeth. Will can’t stop looking at him, how reactive he is to every touch, to every scrape of the blade over his skin.
He even bleeds pretty.
“An - another,” Jim begs, swallowing what is suspiciously close to a sob. Will kisses each cut, one and a time, all the way up both thighs and over Jim’s hips, until his lips are red with blood.
“Shhhh,” he says, pressing his mouth to Jim’s cheek. “You’re okay. Shush.”
Will keeps the sheets in a wad at the bottom of his closet. He can’t let his parents see them and he can’t bear to bin them, so they stay there, crumpled beneath his rolling suitcase. Sometimes, when Jim is entertaining his mother, and Ripley is in the kitchen eating an apple and laughing at their father’s jokes, Will will sit on the floor of his closet and pull out the ruined sheets, his and Jim’s fingerprints in Jim’s blood, the drips and streaks of it. They smell like copper and dust and a little like semen. Will pulls them around his shoulders and lets his head fall back against the wall.
Will throws a glass at his father’s head and storms out of the house. His mother is yelling something, maybe at his father, but Will doesn’t care and he doesn’t look back. He should be wearing a coat to be out in the cold this late, but if he stops than he’ll have time to think, and that is never a good thing this close to his bedroom. There are razors in the bathroom, but he has a knife stashed in his drawer. He pulls the zip of his hoodie up all the way, tugs the hood over his hair, and stuffs his hands in his pockets.
He’s resigned himself to the way that his father sees him - the good-for-nothing fuck-up, the violent miscreant, the bad seed in their good family - but that doesn’t mean he has to like it.
He calls Jim. He doesn’t really have anyone else to call. He’s not sure who else he’d want to call.
“My mum wants me to go back on the pills,” Jim says when he finds Will, shivering, on a bench four blocks away from his house. Jim is wearing a coat and a scarf, his cheeks rosy red from the wind.
“My dad wants to kick me out of the house,” Will says in response.
“You win,” Jim says, a tucks a hand into the crook of Will’s elbow, hauling him to his feet. “You can come to mine, for now. We’ll get you sorted.”
Will should protest, probably, but he’s too fucking tired of everything.
“After you,” he says, and ignores the smile that Jim turns his way.
Jim doesn’t cut him up that night, but Will doesn’t mind because Jim bites down into the sensitive places hard enough to leave Will scrabbling at the sheets. No blood, but deep, yellow and purple bruises on the insides of Will’s arms and thighs, on the curve of belly just below his navel, at the junction between neck and shoulder. Jim bites down and holds on, like he can ground Will with the heat of his mouth, the pressure of his teeth and tongue. Jim’s body settles over him, and Will lets himself go still. Jim pushes the sweaty hair off of his forehead, and kisses him.
Will falls asleep with Jim’s chest against his back, fingers pushing, pushing, pushing against the forming bruises.
In the morning Will goes back to his parents’, and Jim goes with him.
“I’ll go if you want,” Will says, looking not into his father’s eyes, but at the little scab on his jaw where a piece of flying glass may have nicked him. Jim is standing slightly behind Will, and his fingers grab at the back of Will’s hoodie, digging in and holding on. Not restraining, just reassuring. The bruise on Will’s neck is throbbing in time with his pulse, and when he shifts his weight the bites on his inner thighs pull and twinge. Will doesn’t actually care what his father has to say.