[week in review, narrative]
Last Saturday, he was a child.
His apartment felt so much larger then, so much more empty. At that age he wasn't used to living alone, and so he watched the windows obsessively, careful to duck his head at the slightest hint of someone approaching. There was nothing interesting in the apartment either, only newspapers and stories that were so frightening they made him stay up at night. He found himself wandering the Nexus most of the time, listening to questions and burying himself in the comfort of the crowds. He wanted to be bigger again because he figured he'd be better at handling this, even if people kept saying he wasn't going to be a good person. He didn't care.
But then Njoki let him borrow her bird and made him pancakes in the morning, and Jonathan was letting him visit the library instead of threatening him. Jeff came over that one day with Njoki and took him to the zoo where they saw dinosaurs and fictional creatures. He and Jeff spent the entire time swapping jokes and riddles, and everything was fine. He remembers saying-- and believing, in a naive sort of way-- that he promised never to hurt him again... he swore it.
This Saturday, he tortured Jonathan. An older alternate of Jonathan, but Jonathan, Crane, all the same. Soze had been an adult again nearing a week, and all of his promises were starting to come apart. He had tried to control himself, tried to whisper reason into his own head, but it was no use. He got Jonathan alone and started tearing him apart, firing near-miss bullets and calling him useless and pathetic and ruined. In hindsight, he might have been talking about himself (maybe), but right then there was only rage. He wanted to bring him to his knees. He wanted to make Crane scream like he had in that vault all those months ago. It was his revenge, and he loved it.
Until he saw what he was doing, that is. How he was pulling himself down, too. He's becoming something else. He isn't a businessman anymore. He's a simple murderer. He's a bully. He's out of his element. He must be insane, because he keeps trying the same things over and over again and hoping for different results...
(and for god's sake, jon was nice to him, he wanted to like him)
Last night, he was feargassed.
He expected it. Jeff had come over earlier that day, asking if something had happened, and he didn't lie. He told him everything. Crane. Bullets. Snow. The frightening thing was that he felt bad about it. Not because he knew punishment was inevitable, or even because he left Crane in a whimpering pile out in the cold. It was because Jeff had taken him to the zoo and protected him and kept his goddamn ashes after everything, and now this was what it came to. The past week, they even had something like a friendship.
That day, Jeff left without saying goodbye.
This must be what happens when you get to the bottom of the pecking order, he told himself. You start caring about what other people think. Great.
All day he waited for the familiar tightening of his chest, the fluttering of his heart, the sweat on his palms, tell-tale signs of fear gas. When it finally hit, it took him off guard anyway. That's what it does.
It came in through Jeff's side of the link. Soze shrieked and screamed and stabbed himself in the leg twice, just wanting this to stop, please. He saw himself about to die fifty times over. His legs went numb. Several times his entire body stiffened and he fell forward, nearly banging his head against the cool tile of his kitchen, but he always managed to catch himself. The blood was pooling on his pant leg. He lost consciousness maybe fifteen minutes into it, and when he came out of it, he stabbed himself again, just out of habit. He saw from his PINpoint that he had been sending messages the entire time, though he had no idea what.
He tried to stand up, but he couldn't.
He stayed on the ground for a while, a long while, falling in and out of sleep as the night went on. In the morning, the pain in his leg was only a dull throb, though his pants were ruined and the tile below it was stained a deep red. He felt strangely removed from the whole thing. Jeff was being treated somewhere, and that was probably good enough for him. Okay.
He tried to fall asleep again, but he couldn't. He only stared out the window from his spot on the ground, counting the heads as they went by.