[Oneshot] “We’ve Bitten Our Nails To The Quick, Darling”
“We’ve Bitten Our Nails To The Quick, Darling”
Rating: T
Characters: Denmark (Søren), Netherlands (Wilm), Norway (Sindre)
Summary: Human AU! After an argument between two best friends over medication that hadn’t been taken that had gotten physical, Søren thinks maybe he is not so brave and not so invulnerable as he believed.He wasn't a coward. Or at least, he hadn't been a coward. What do you call hiding out in your best friend's apartment for a few days because you're not willing to go home and look at the evidence that you'd really fucked up this time?
…Søren guessed it'd be called cowardice.
Fuck.
He'd hardly been what one could call awake when he shoved a few days' worth of clothing and other necessities into an old messenger bag and fled without locking the door, with barely the presence of mind to wonder what his family would think…
But that had been on Friday night.
Now it was Sunday night.
He'd shoved his way into Wilm's apartment with his stolen spare key (or maybe he jimmied the lock, but it was all sort of a blur) and commandeered the sofa silently.
It had been allowed to pass for an hour, maybe two as Søren was patched up and dusted off. He'd blatantly rejected a trip to the hospital when Wilm made the suggestion. He'd asked Søren who'd done this to him.
It seemed only honest to say he'd done it to himself.
Wilm didn't understand.
"If I just taken the damn thing," Søren said over and over, "If I had just taken it-"
He said it over and over and he wasn't crying even though he desperately felt like he should be.
But that had been on Friday night, and now he was embarrassed to have shown such ridiculousness to anyone let alone Wilm, best friend though he might be.
Now it was Sunday night.
He knew the continued silence was probably grating on Wilm, though the Dutchman couldn't be considered talkative by any stretch of the imagination. His phone hadn't gone off once, not even with a message from Kai. He wondered if Kai had even come home for the weekend and then realized what a fucking bastard he was for not even knowing where his cousin was.
He knew with sudden startling clarity that everything Sindre had said, all the things he chalked up to being bullshit and retaliated to with his own barbs had been right.
And goddamn if that didn't hurt a little more than the cut above his eye.
He'd fucked up a good thing pretty damn well this time. But that was his fucking luck, always ruining something the tighter he tried to hold onto it because it broke and shattered under his hand. This was as much the same.
Since hindsight felt like being particular bitchy tonight, he could now clearly recall every mistake he'd made.
The afternoon of June 12th when he tripped over that step and sprawled out on the landing, when he'd looked up and saw Sindre after so long and felt his breath catch for the first time in seven years.
July 14th, which felt like a dream of some poor medieval comedy movie, like the one they'd been watching. The heroic knight had fallen asleep in the end to supposedly wake up and have the world be back to normal. But instead he'd woken up and found the dream continuing under the slumbering warmth of the magician ally.
The entire goddamned month of August.
The 14th was spent draped over Sindre's lap, ironically telling him everything, everything and wanting to do nothing more than turn over and say "Just kidding, I've been talking about you the whole time." No.
The 25th-really more like the night of the 24th. Sindre had stayed over again (just another product of Søren and that grip on things), and that day had fucked over his entire outlook on how the world worked and left him shaking as he sat under a stream of frigid water from the shower head, trying to deny what he had just seen, trying to deny the feeling of holding Sindre like he'd been wanting to.
The 29th when he was still trying to acclimate himself to these new truths, feeling infinitely fragile. And then he'd overheard things he shouldn't have, how things stood between Sindre and Berwald now that Tino was gone, and there was really nothing more to be said, was there? He'd lost out. He wasn't good enough. He'd known it already, so damn if he wasn't going to celebrate being free by getting wasted out of his fucking mind. Instead he just felt more miserable and he'd been dumped off by some half-blind homeless bastard into the Norwegian's arms, the last place he wanted to be at the moment. He'd been sighed over and coddled and he wanted to choke on it and die from disgust from how fucking simplistically happy it made him. So he left as soon as he was able.
And it was a million other goddamn things and events and situations.
And he had fucked it up over petty bullshit because-
His thumb brushed over the keypad of his phone, summoning the form that would send a text message to Sindre.
'I'm sorry.'
'It was mostly my fault.'
'I depend on you way too fucking much and I just need to leave you alone and get over this before I break you too, but I don't think I can and I'm not sure I want to but I should. I should.'
…he was still too angry to be that honest.
So he sent a text message to somebody else instead.
He wanted to hit himself again, because here it was again. Sindre pervading everything in his life, even this phone number. Maybe it was sort of a fitting send-off, using a number Sindre had given him to say goodbye and take care, even if it was sort of ass-backwards way to do it.
'Hej Berwald. You got a minute to spare? Wanna have a chat with you.'