Falling Falling Stars

02 - Green

AN: Can I like, warn for intrusive thoughts all over again? x.x Also: Additional tag/warning: hate speech (homophobia). It doesn't last long in the story.

*

The first thing he noticed was that the park on his route was very green. He didn't care about colours, except for red, but he noticed that anyway. The green felt nice. It was spring, and the grass was a good, healthy colour. He noticed it and actually felt something. It didn't last long, and it was kind of insipid, but it left him feeling unsettled, like someone came in and stole away his regular brain that he'd been using all his life and put another person's brain in there.

The one thing Dr Gary would never let him escape from, even in the beginning, was Efnisien's perception of himself as being wholly evil.

Back then, his gut still miserable with pain even while he told everyone that he was fine, really, he'd sit in the gross, picked-at armchair and scowl at nothing while Dr Gary talked to him.

'We know – you've admitted yourself – that you put your life on the line in order to save your cousin, Gwyn ap Nudd. For that and that reason alone, you were violently stabbed by your Aunt, cut off from presumably a millionaire's inheritance, and remanded to the residential treatment facility here at Hillview just to access a stipend. You effectively saved your cousin. That is by every definition, a selfless act. A self-destructive one, but also selfless.'

'Fuck you, you absolute fucking piece of trash,' Efnisien said.

That was before Dr Gary had talked to him about how many instances of verbal abuse he'd allow per session, and Efnisien got away with calling him a piece of shit way more than three measly times.

Back then, they didn't seem to care as much about how he'd hurt animals or how he'd hurt people and they always focused on the shit they weren't supposed to be focusing on. It wasn't that they didn't care that he'd hurt people and animals, they definitely didn't leave him alone with any weapons, and he was never once allowed a bunkmate like nearly everyone else, but they just...didn't constantly talk to him about it. Which, frankly, was what Efnisien had expected and was almost looking forward to.

Instead they focused on bizarre shit.

When do you feel happy? Why does hurting animals and people make you feel good? When was the last time you felt genuinely happy? When was the first time it felt good to hurt an animal? Was that the first time you hurt an animal?

No, but he wasn't going to tell them that.

Except that he did tell them, eventually. Because Dr Gary always made him feel like he was succeeding at something when he was honest about shit, and he missed that feeling. He missed it and he hadn't really gotten it properly since Crielle and fucking hell, he knew all about transference and it was humiliating, but if this was the only way to get it...

He didn't have her number, and she hadn't contacted him again. He knew she never would. She hated him. He'd betrayed her.

So the park was green, and he thought he'd probably spent about two decades of his life not really being aware of things like that. The only things that mattered to him were making Gwyn happy, or torturing him, and the exhilarating rush that came from hurting others, or hurting himself.

'I'm a sadist,' Efnisien said in another session, two years ago in that still-shitty, still-the-same armchair. It was blue and gross.

'No, you're a sadomasochist.'

'I'm a sadist to myself! So I'm a fucking sadist all round, Doc.'

'No, you're a sadomasochist. Efnisien, I know you want to identify primarily as a sadist, and you are definitely capable of extreme sadism, but you've told me yourself that you have been kind when the situation allowed it-'