Crackerbox ✔

seven: blurry vision

There is a blurry line between the present and the past. Crossing it feels like falling snow. Soft, light, cold to the bones---and then it whirls into a storm, piling, piling, piling until it buries Lee alive. The knowledge that every action flecks his blood-stained hands with another scar tugs at every cell, stretching them taut against the cage of his skin. Stepping into the past is cruel, painful, acid on his tongue, a laminated snapshot he'd buried in the dark. Every time he reaches out for the present, it crumbles, nothing but sandcastle dreams. And Lee knows, just knows, that once he walks into the past this time, he won't be able to come back.

Maybe he doesn't want to come back.

٩( ᐛ )و

Lee's blood burns. It scorches his bones black and boils the marrow in his limbs. His chest stings, rage scorching crimson trails across every rib. The mark on his elbow wavers and grows and spreads, dripping with liquid ruination and tangling his nerves into a hurricane.

Yumeko would kill me if she knew I was doing this. Or maybe she'd join in.

The thought makes him smile. His grin's gone as quickly as it had come, though, replaced with anxious fingers tugging at scarred knuckles. The raised, curving line is somehow comforting, a beacon in the night. A reminder that he's done this before, and he can do it again.

"You're angry," the only therapist he's ever gone to had said, her blank pad pin-still on her lap. "You're angry at your dad for ignoring you and at your mom for moving to Spain with her new boyfriend."

"I'm not angry," Lee had insisted. "Mom calls me every day."

She hadn't listened, of course. No one ever had. "You're angry. That's why you're taking your anger out on other people."

Lee had stood up and left, because there hadn't been any point in telling her that no, he wasn't taking his anger out on other people, because he'd never fought anyone before, and he hadn't wanted to fight anyone, but they'd hurt Jack, and they'd hurt him, and---

"The fuck's wrong with you?"

Danny's voice is just as sharp as it's always been, words plucked straight off banjo strings. Normally, Lee would jump---fake a reaction of some sort---but because he likes to think that this isn't particularly normal, he simply beams as brightly as he can. "Hey, Danny! I see you brought your friends!"

Danny scowls, his two lackeys following suit by plastering matching frowns across their faces. "What's it to you?"

"Oh, nothing." Lee lifts his hand to his chin, inspecting his nails carefully. "Just didn't think you were so much of a pussy that you needed to have backup for a casual talk."

"You threatened to fucking hunt me down. I don't think there's anything casual about this talk."

Lee feels his grin widen. "You're right. Also, we won't be talking."