OSC One-Shots

Airy-Centric | The One, & Only One, & Only One I Love Is Me

Word count: 1,121
Tags: Self-harm, suicidal ideation, self-deprecation, heavy angst.
Vent-fic, proceed with caution, do NOT read if you are not stable.
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And when he wakes up, it's like he breathed for the first time.

He's scrambling, hands gripping upon the dirt ground for some sort of baring-

Yet when Airy opens his eyes, he's clutching at his sheets; far, far away from the Waiting Room's plane, far away from the wet cave.

And oh, Gods, he feels horrible. Absolutely horrible.

Sucking in a deep breath, his hands clumsily knock into the bedside table as he rummages through the creaky drawer. Blankets strewn across the bed, his posture is horrible as he sits up.

The blade hits his eyes with the reflection of the rising sun from the window.

Airy doesn't want to be here. He wants to go back, back to the plane. Back to when he was alone, where his entertainment came from his cassette player and the show.

He didn't want to be here, not at all.

There's a bitter taste in the back of his throat, it makes him gulp, makes him take even deeper breaths.

This is bad, Airy knows. That what he's about to do is horrible, but the pressure of the thin, thin metal against the skin of his thigh is towards the path to relief. Towards the path of feeling better.

So, he presses, let's the blade run through his skin. Feels the cold rush of pain, before he does it again, and again, and again.

It hurts, it feels a bit itchy, but seeing the red and smelling like tossed coins has never felt better.

Airy isn't sure if he's able to stop, not sure if he can make himself stop.

And so what if he isn't able to stop, to get clean? He'll never be free of sin, never will be free cleansed of how tainted he is; and he's only reinforcing that statement with each bead of blood that wells up between the white slits of his cuts, each "shhk" noise of skin tearing open with how hard he is going at it.

Airy wants to go back.

Desperately misses his home- feels sick of living in the city. Feels sick having to reside with the people who have despised him because he forced them to play a game.

It was only a game, after all, not to be taken seriously. So why did he have to stay when they dreaded his existence? Why did he have to stay if all they wanted to do was argue, argue, and argue with him?

After all, who are they when they aren't arguing?

Airy presses the blade against his skin again, his thigh is an utter mess. It's a bright red, it's a coppery smell, yet it's deserved.

The empty cavity that fills his chest is somehow satisfied, yet even then, it's never enough.

Even then, he still yearns for more.

Wants to hurt more, wants to cause greater damage than what's laid out beforehand.

A small part of him wants to go back to the Waiting Room for the hell of it, to mindlessly switch through stations over and over again, to flip up the receiver and die again and again until he finds Home.

But that's gone now, erased entirely by Liam.

It makes a tiny part of him go insane.

If he even had any sanity in the first place, the amount of times Airy has been called a psychopath is insane in of itself.

How frustrating.

The grip on the blade gets tighter, white knuckles and twitching hands.

Press down, slice.

Press down, slice.

Press down, slice.

Disgusting.

Revolting.

Airy's body is forever ruined, stained by his own actions.

The blood flows, stains his forest green sheets. It spreads out, clotting at the ends of the once-white cuts.

One thing that was infuriating was how fast the body heals.

It scabs over quickly, and Airy has to go through the process of going over it again and again, until he sees more and more white underneath the layers of skin. Until the pain numbs and turns into an afterthought entirely.

And God, there is so much red.

The maroon piles up and up, sinks further into the poor fabric of his mattress.

His fingers are itchy, his body wants more.

So he makes that itch deeper, deeper until it's satisfied. Until the coil of his gut lets up, until the tears threatening to spill from his eyes pull back.

Tilting his head up, Airy continued to breathe.

How pathetic, that the first thing he does when he wakes up is to relapse. All because the place he belonged to didn't stick with him.

"I don't know how you did it," Liam had said, "How you stayed at that... Place. I was only alone for a couple of days, while you were gone for... At least a decade."

Hell knows how he managed to make it that long, either!

Airy has been gone for longer than Liam has.

The only way to escape that reality was by killing himself.

But... A part of him stopped before he could do anything truly life-threatening.

A bummer, considering how everyone that participated in ONE clearly had something out for him.

Airy doesn't even know what's stopping him from cutting even deeper, let himself bleed out against his sheets just to feel how horrible he is.

The wet sheets cling onto his skin, blood pooling out and expanding like tears against paper.

It shouldn't make him feel good, yet a part of him feels lighter.

The weight that had settled in his chest lifts.

The bloodied, dulling blade drops onto his thighs as me makes his way to clean up.

It's barely morning, but he's feeling more awake now.

The bitter taste lingering at the back of his throat festers, begs.

Airy doesn't want to continue to satiate it, so he tucks the blade back in it's rightful place- where he, and only himself checks. Pulls off the sheets to put in the wash, wipes off any blood that might have gotten into the crevices of his metal body. It's a steady process to clean up, but cleanliness is something necessary.

As the blood on his thighs scab up, he feels it crack open with each wrong movement.

It doesn't matter.

He did this to himself, he deals with the consequences.

Deals with the welling shame that bubbles up.

Airy knew what he was getting into when he impulsively grabbed the vice, there is no use for him to complain.

Ignoring how the mattress is stained with reds and blacks from past occurrences, he lies back down upon it. It's filthy, absolutely filthy, but it's his space. The only space where he's alone, the only space where nobody will barge in.

His space.

And only his.