Schatzi

25

It was a shitty shitty birthday. The house was empty, his arm hurt, and his thoughts were so loud he felt like ramming a knife into his head just to shut them up. He sort of wished he'd got his friends to stay. Have a party. Get completely wasted. Not have to think about anything.

He stood up from the sofa in the now empty living room, glasses and bottles littering the surfaces, along with several pieces of paper and pens which people had been taking notes down with. He gathered everything up and tidied it all away, glad for something to do other than just sit about all night. He washed the glasses and put away most of the alcohol, except for the bottle of whisky he'd been drinking from earlier, when Tig got him the glass.

He climbed the stairs, socked feet padding quietly against the polished wood. The door to their bedroom was closed so he pushed it open, the familiar smell engulfing him the moment he walked in. This room had always smelt nice with candles placed on cabinets and on bedside tables, and fresh flowers in an ornate floral vase. He sat down on the edge of the bed, the soft mattress sinking slightly beneath him.

When he'd finally returned to the house after almost a year of avoiding it...it had been hard. The flowers in the bedroom had been the final straw. Obviously, they'd wilted and died a long time ago and were just shrivelled and crumpled husks that turned to dust when he touched them with shaking hands. That had broken him. He'd waited months to go back home in the hope when he finally did, he'd be able to hold it together. He'd been wrong, and he'd broken down in this exact spot, all alone, holding his head in his hands as he cried for hours.

Eventually, he'd curled up in the bed, still in his clothes, on top of the sheets, and had just laid there until he was pulled into a deep, troubled sleep that was filled with nightmares he couldn't wake from.

And it had been the same almost every night since then. He'd started trying to avoid going to sleep. He'd stay up all night, doing anything he could to knock back the exhaustion. But eventually he'd have to sleep and endure the nightmares, the thoughts of Peter, again.

He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, pushing it out of his face. He got up off the bed and walked over to the desk in the corner of the room which was covered in more empty mugs and glasses and stacks and stacks of paper. He picked up a pretty blue fountain pen from where it had rolled onto the floor and uncapped it, leaning over the paper as he wrote.

That was the main thing he did now to keep himself busy. He wrote for hours and hours on end. Pamphlets, stories, poetry, anything really. The pamphlets they handed out earlier that day contained his words, explaining the struggles minorities were facing in Germany.

He'd also written ones on the war, and about what a bad idea that was.

They were at war now- since a couple of months ago. It was doomed to fail, he was sure of it. He didn't support it, didn't see how more violence would help. So he wrote about it. Put all his thoughts and feelings down on paper, unfiltered and unedited.

But it wasn't all just political. He wrote about Peter a lot. At first it had been painful, but the more he wrote, the better he felt. He would often cry though, his tears falling onto the paper and making the ink run. But he wrote better when in that state. Raw emotion, poured out onto the page, his handwriting messy, not much more than just scribbles.

He was about to start writing again, aiming to stay up all night and do that instead of sleeping, when he realised that his pen was out of ink. He pushed his chair back, looking around on the desk for another but he couldn't see any. He opened all the drawers but there was none in there.

"Shit," he muttered to himself, getting up and looking about the room, looking in the bedside table where he kept any books he was reading. Nothing. He flopped onto the bed and shimmied across so he could reach the twin table on Peter's side, opening the drawers and sifting through the many items in there. More books, the glasses he'd made Eli where when he was playing 'Otto', the box that Eli's treasure chest necklace had come in.