All That Bloodshed

Chapter 5: we're burned for better

Notes:

More sad times ahead for Arisu, but this is a relatively lighter chapter. Sorry that it's a bit shorter! I just didn't have as much content for this one. The beginning stretches out a bit but I don't really want to cut anything either so here it is.

Ryouhei stared up at the ceiling, numb.

He'd woken up in his room to the returned presence of his brother. He'd had a freak out in the hallway when he'd wandered on his own. The hospital staff believed it would be better for him if he didn't wander on his own anymore. It was a thinly veiled order to stay in his room unless someone was able to be with him. It was patronizing.

Ryouhei had always had... problems with being overwhelmed. When things got too much, he shut down. He'd done it since he was a child. It'd been especially bad when his mother had died and... well... his father had been less than pleased. Ryouhei was a difficult child; intelligent and yet struggling in school. He wasted away, dropping out of university after only a year, unable to handle it. His younger brother had always held more promise. These... overloads had been a prime example of his inadequacy.

He really shouldn't have been surprised that he'd broken down when he did. It'd probably been building for days without him noticing because he was too busy thinking about everything else. He'd never been good with hospitals but after watching his mother die in one, his difficulties had only increased. He'd done his best to push down the buzz beneath his skiing but well... he had bandages on his wrists not because of the meteor accident but because he couldn't stop himself from clawing at the skin there whenever he got anxious.

In the Borderlands, he'd come close a few times, but he'd been under too much stress to be able to dedicate any energy to freaking out. His brain had entered survival mode and suddenly nothing else mattered. He was hypervigilant, always aware that at any moment, something could go wrong. Especially near the end, when the second stage began, when the King of Spades was laying waste to any survivors he came across. There was no time for him to lose his sense of reality the way that he tended to in the real world.

He'd thought that with waking up back in the real world, that he'd gotten over all of that. That because he'd come out stronger, it wouldn't be a problem anymore. He should have known better.

He'd been holding himself together by a thread since waking up. Seeing the others had both helped keep him together and torn him apart further. It was hard, confronting just how damaged he was even before he'd nearly died.

He'd earned himself some new injuries, although all superficial in nature. Scratches all down his arms that didn't need bandages, bruises along the side of his head where he'd hit a little too hard. It'd earned him a wicked stress headache, but he'd been found before he could do too much damage to himself. He honestly had some mixed feelings about that. He'd always been left to his own devices whenever he panicked before, so this time being different made him feel off-kilter. He just needed to ride out the wave of too-large feelings. He was always okay after even if he was left utterly drained and covered in raised welts from clawing at himself.

His brother had been nearly beside himself, all but yelling when Ryouhei had woken up. Ryouhei had ignored him, zoning out and just... disappearing into his head for a while. He was safe there. His brother's anger and frustration couldn't reach him.

He thought that his brother tried to make it so that he couldn't see the others, but the staff hadn't allowed that due to the net positive result it'd had on his speech progress. He'd had a setback. That was normal in healing, or so they say.

He still felt like shit about it.

He should be doing more. He should be getting better. He didn't want to keep disappointing everyone around him and backsliding. Deep down, he was terrified that he hadn't changed at all; that he was just the same loser he'd been before the Borderlands.