Fic: Close Enough
Title: Close Enough
Pairing: Paul/Sarah
Warning: Self-harm, drug addiction, PTSD, implied assault
Notes: I find it hilarious that I started out hating this pairing, and now it's become my everything. Anyway, here's my first Paul/Sarah fic. Minor spoilers below cut.
The only sound in the unit is the repeated hiss of cards being shuffled. It adds a sharp tang to the air, like chewing on razor blades. Her knuckles are aching, the pressure building in her phalanges, like spiderwebs creeping out through her nerves and lacing around her spinal cord. Nearby, a girl repeatedly clicks her pen, as if she wants to write something but can’t decide. The sound is giving her a headache, rooted deep in the right side of her temple, swelling like some sort of cancer, until it’s practically blinding, and she can’t help but lash out.
“For fuck’s sake, would you stop clicking?” she snaps, looking at the girl, who stares back with vacuous owl-eyes.
“Sarah, do you need another language and profanity packet?” the nurse asks from behind the desk, each word halting with condescension.
Her spine bristles, and she shifts in her seat, a caustic reply brooding within her teeth, but instead she swallows it down. “No…”
“Please apologize to Claire,” the nurse continues.
“Sorry,” she mumbles, but it tastes the same as most of her other apologies; dry, bitter, and artificial.
&&
The dilemna with Paul, she realizes, is that she can’t distinguish whether what she feels for him is lust or love. It’s some of the best sex she’s ever had, but at the same time there coexists this constant anguish, that worsens the more she takes from him. It’s like the hunger of the wendigo, constant, unrepentant, satiated only by feasting, yet worsened by it at the same time. His kisses taste like a headache, his touch is the icy burn of a misused razor. It reminds her of cutting, of breaking plastic forks in half while at the clinics and using them to carve tally marks into the parts of her body where they won’t see; under her breasts, on her stomach, her hipbones. But eventually the staff discover her self-inflicted wounds, and they put her on constant observation; she’s to wear a hospital gown, pull her mattress into the hall and sleep with her hands visible, she has to shower and use the bathroom with someone watching, and she can only eat finger foods.
That’s what he is, she thinks. He is her own personal brand of self-harm and she wears him like a scar.
&&
The drugs drain the color from her skin. They are vampiric, they even bite, but with fangs of metal instead of bone, and instead of drinking her blood they immerse it with the sweetest of toxins. With each dose she feels the very architecture of her bones crumbling into dust, fading away in a zephyr of black sands. The heroin gives the refuge that sleep can’t. Sleep is a cold, faceless oblivion, oozing icy treacles that crawl beneath her fingernails and swallow up her insides. But heroin is warmth, heroin is the comfort of her mother’s womb, the irreplaceable sensation of safety that she craves so desperately. It’s only to the heroin that she’s willing to admit that she wants that warmth, the warmth of protection, the warmth of Mrs. S that she purposely ran away from.
&&
When she’s twenty she disappears for the umpteenth time. She leaves with no parting words, no letters or any other sort of hints of her absence. She comes a year later twenty-one and nine months pregnant. Mrs. S never asks, and Sarah never tells.
&&
They share a bed on a regular basis, but to neither of them is it a confirmation of a relationship between them. Like her apologies, the word boyfriend leaves a sour taste in her mouth, like the way nail polish remover smells. She can’t exactly pinpoint what it is that they share between them, because it’s more than just sex, but it’s less than love. They rely on the language of touch rather than words, each movement carving out a different story in the other’s flesh. Sometimes they come in the form of caresses, gentle strokes, ghostly whispers of touch. Other times they come in a more permanent form, of hickeys and fingernail marks, scars and bite marks. The best stories are the ones told with both.
&&
Occasionally she wakes to the jolt of a hand and desperate gasps for breath. He has nightmares of his days in Afghanistan, violent, jagged shards of memory stuck in his brain. They have a ritual of sorts in place for when he has nightmares. It’s not the usual, at least not all the time, where she holds him like a delicate vase (though that does occasionally happen). Usually she says nothing, maybe touches his back, then gets up and gets him a glass of water.
She has nightmares too, of being tested in the middle of the night. She can still feel the cold, slick hands of the doctors holding her down as she struggles beneath them, gasping and choking as they force god knows what down her throat. She also has other dreams, of her past, of running away in the middle of the night, of being attacked in back alleys. Those she does not tell him about, but she has a feeling that there is a part of him that senses she’s not telling him everything. Nonetheless, there is an understanding between them, albeit a muted one.
They both know they keep secrets from one another. The fact that they don’t bother each other about them isn’t really because they’re okay with it, but because they don’t want the other to tear them down for asking.
&&
She gets her nose pierced when she’s sixteen. Not the conventional way; while she’s at the hospital, a girl sneaks in a safety pin along the inseam of her jeans. They find a blind spot in the security cameras and gather there. At first she’s able to hide it, quite easily in fact, but then it starts to grow ruddy and swollen, and soon it’s oozing every minute of the day. It’s not long before one of the staff inquires, and then she has to be treated, and the girl’s safety pin is taken away.
She continues the trend even after she’s left the hospital. It’s not the piercing itself she wants, it’s the pain. It’s the cold bite of metal penetrating her flesh, the hissing pain of an eraser burn. She likes to push herself further each time, see how much she can handle. After a while Mrs. S catches on and sends her to therapy. She spends each session lying on a couch for one hour and saying nothing, playing with a Rubik’s Cube while the therapist waits for her speak.
&&
One night she wakes up to the monotonous bleep-bleep-bleep of an EKG, and suddenly light is flitting between her eyelids in scant slivers, hazy and unfocused, and once she fully regains consciousness, she realizes that she’s in a hospital room. Paul is at her side, watching her, his face its usual expressionless tone.
“What happened?” she rasps, her tongue a thick, slimy presence in her mouth.
“You overdosed on heroin,” he says slowly, and his tone, icy but not spiteful, betrays no emotion.
“Where’s Kira?” the words are falling off her lips before she even realizes what she’s saying.
Before he speaks, the heavy thud of realization falls upon her in sifting layers- she’s overdosed on heroin, she’s overdosed on heroin right when she was trying to prove to Mrs. S that she could take care of Kira, right in the middle of all this clone, neolutionist, conspiracy bullshit.
“She’s with Mrs. S,” he says. “She doesn’t know what happened.”
Her head sinks into the pillow, and she wonders if she can make it sink deep enough that she’ll be lost in the crackling fabric forever. “Fuck.”
She looks away to the window, to the dark outside and the whisper of starlight smothered by the city light. Her heart is choking inside her chest, crushed by her own ribcage, and she’s too weak to do anything about it. She knows any chance of raising her daughter is gone, now. Mrs. S is never going to let her see Kira. She closes her eyes, the closest thing to peace she can get, and feels Paul’s hand cradling hers. She has him, at least. Maybe it’s not love, but it’s close enough.
Pairing: Paul/Sarah
Warning: Self-harm, drug addiction, PTSD, implied assault
Notes: I find it hilarious that I started out hating this pairing, and now it's become my everything. Anyway, here's my first Paul/Sarah fic. Minor spoilers below cut.
The only sound in the unit is the repeated hiss of cards being shuffled. It adds a sharp tang to the air, like chewing on razor blades. Her knuckles are aching, the pressure building in her phalanges, like spiderwebs creeping out through her nerves and lacing around her spinal cord. Nearby, a girl repeatedly clicks her pen, as if she wants to write something but can’t decide. The sound is giving her a headache, rooted deep in the right side of her temple, swelling like some sort of cancer, until it’s practically blinding, and she can’t help but lash out.
“For fuck’s sake, would you stop clicking?” she snaps, looking at the girl, who stares back with vacuous owl-eyes.
“Sarah, do you need another language and profanity packet?” the nurse asks from behind the desk, each word halting with condescension.
Her spine bristles, and she shifts in her seat, a caustic reply brooding within her teeth, but instead she swallows it down. “No…”
“Please apologize to Claire,” the nurse continues.
“Sorry,” she mumbles, but it tastes the same as most of her other apologies; dry, bitter, and artificial.
&&
The dilemna with Paul, she realizes, is that she can’t distinguish whether what she feels for him is lust or love. It’s some of the best sex she’s ever had, but at the same time there coexists this constant anguish, that worsens the more she takes from him. It’s like the hunger of the wendigo, constant, unrepentant, satiated only by feasting, yet worsened by it at the same time. His kisses taste like a headache, his touch is the icy burn of a misused razor. It reminds her of cutting, of breaking plastic forks in half while at the clinics and using them to carve tally marks into the parts of her body where they won’t see; under her breasts, on her stomach, her hipbones. But eventually the staff discover her self-inflicted wounds, and they put her on constant observation; she’s to wear a hospital gown, pull her mattress into the hall and sleep with her hands visible, she has to shower and use the bathroom with someone watching, and she can only eat finger foods.
That’s what he is, she thinks. He is her own personal brand of self-harm and she wears him like a scar.
&&
The drugs drain the color from her skin. They are vampiric, they even bite, but with fangs of metal instead of bone, and instead of drinking her blood they immerse it with the sweetest of toxins. With each dose she feels the very architecture of her bones crumbling into dust, fading away in a zephyr of black sands. The heroin gives the refuge that sleep can’t. Sleep is a cold, faceless oblivion, oozing icy treacles that crawl beneath her fingernails and swallow up her insides. But heroin is warmth, heroin is the comfort of her mother’s womb, the irreplaceable sensation of safety that she craves so desperately. It’s only to the heroin that she’s willing to admit that she wants that warmth, the warmth of protection, the warmth of Mrs. S that she purposely ran away from.
&&
When she’s twenty she disappears for the umpteenth time. She leaves with no parting words, no letters or any other sort of hints of her absence. She comes a year later twenty-one and nine months pregnant. Mrs. S never asks, and Sarah never tells.
&&
They share a bed on a regular basis, but to neither of them is it a confirmation of a relationship between them. Like her apologies, the word boyfriend leaves a sour taste in her mouth, like the way nail polish remover smells. She can’t exactly pinpoint what it is that they share between them, because it’s more than just sex, but it’s less than love. They rely on the language of touch rather than words, each movement carving out a different story in the other’s flesh. Sometimes they come in the form of caresses, gentle strokes, ghostly whispers of touch. Other times they come in a more permanent form, of hickeys and fingernail marks, scars and bite marks. The best stories are the ones told with both.
&&
Occasionally she wakes to the jolt of a hand and desperate gasps for breath. He has nightmares of his days in Afghanistan, violent, jagged shards of memory stuck in his brain. They have a ritual of sorts in place for when he has nightmares. It’s not the usual, at least not all the time, where she holds him like a delicate vase (though that does occasionally happen). Usually she says nothing, maybe touches his back, then gets up and gets him a glass of water.
She has nightmares too, of being tested in the middle of the night. She can still feel the cold, slick hands of the doctors holding her down as she struggles beneath them, gasping and choking as they force god knows what down her throat. She also has other dreams, of her past, of running away in the middle of the night, of being attacked in back alleys. Those she does not tell him about, but she has a feeling that there is a part of him that senses she’s not telling him everything. Nonetheless, there is an understanding between them, albeit a muted one.
They both know they keep secrets from one another. The fact that they don’t bother each other about them isn’t really because they’re okay with it, but because they don’t want the other to tear them down for asking.
&&
She gets her nose pierced when she’s sixteen. Not the conventional way; while she’s at the hospital, a girl sneaks in a safety pin along the inseam of her jeans. They find a blind spot in the security cameras and gather there. At first she’s able to hide it, quite easily in fact, but then it starts to grow ruddy and swollen, and soon it’s oozing every minute of the day. It’s not long before one of the staff inquires, and then she has to be treated, and the girl’s safety pin is taken away.
She continues the trend even after she’s left the hospital. It’s not the piercing itself she wants, it’s the pain. It’s the cold bite of metal penetrating her flesh, the hissing pain of an eraser burn. She likes to push herself further each time, see how much she can handle. After a while Mrs. S catches on and sends her to therapy. She spends each session lying on a couch for one hour and saying nothing, playing with a Rubik’s Cube while the therapist waits for her speak.
&&
One night she wakes up to the monotonous bleep-bleep-bleep of an EKG, and suddenly light is flitting between her eyelids in scant slivers, hazy and unfocused, and once she fully regains consciousness, she realizes that she’s in a hospital room. Paul is at her side, watching her, his face its usual expressionless tone.
“What happened?” she rasps, her tongue a thick, slimy presence in her mouth.
“You overdosed on heroin,” he says slowly, and his tone, icy but not spiteful, betrays no emotion.
“Where’s Kira?” the words are falling off her lips before she even realizes what she’s saying.
Before he speaks, the heavy thud of realization falls upon her in sifting layers- she’s overdosed on heroin, she’s overdosed on heroin right when she was trying to prove to Mrs. S that she could take care of Kira, right in the middle of all this clone, neolutionist, conspiracy bullshit.
“She’s with Mrs. S,” he says. “She doesn’t know what happened.”
Her head sinks into the pillow, and she wonders if she can make it sink deep enough that she’ll be lost in the crackling fabric forever. “Fuck.”
She looks away to the window, to the dark outside and the whisper of starlight smothered by the city light. Her heart is choking inside her chest, crushed by her own ribcage, and she’s too weak to do anything about it. She knows any chance of raising her daughter is gone, now. Mrs. S is never going to let her see Kira. She closes her eyes, the closest thing to peace she can get, and feels Paul’s hand cradling hers. She has him, at least. Maybe it’s not love, but it’s close enough.