Hold Me Close (Sequel To Take Me Home and Keep Me Safe)

Chapter Thirty

Things had been getting better. For the first time in about as long as he could remember, he felt hope for the future. He went out to do the shopping with his Dad just to spend time with him, he sat with Papa in the living room in the evenings and watched movies with him. He and Louis had been getting on well, his brother having been in a better mood recently what with his last few weeks of having to wear the boot approaching.

He and Holly spoke often. She made him feel all warm inside and he felt like he could be honest with her.

Overall, it seemed as if things were looking up. His flashbacks and panic attacks were few and far between, and he slept easier at night.

He knew his parents had noticed it too. He saw the way they looked at each other with glassy eyes whenever he laughed, the way they would smile and ruffle his hair whenever he came down the stairs in a good mood in the mornings.

He should have known it wouldn't last. The darkness never stayed at bay for long, he was no stranger to the way it would creep back in without him even knowing it until he was deep in its grasp again.

This time, he didn't even feel it until it was suffocating him - drowning in it all, filling his lungs, grappling it's way up from his abdomen to his throat so he couldn't breathe.

It crept in like the silent killer it was. First, the hours spent tossing and turning at night, unable to drift off until the early hours. The next days and weeks gradually growing more and more sleep deprived; unable to keep his eyes open when he was meant to be doing schoolwork in the living room, easily irritated by the smallest of things, too tired to even speak some days. Then came the thoughts; the exhaustion in his body seeping up into his mind, inner voice growing careless and sinister. From there it was a spiral.

It was being too consumed by the threats inside of his own head to spend time with his family in the evenings. It was laying in bed for hours on end with no motivation to do anything else. It was the panic attacks that started without warning and left him wishing to disappear, then the disappearing into a flashback and begging to come back.

And suddenly, it was like the past few weeks since Christmas hadn't even happened. Like all of that happiness and hope and recovery had melted away into a headspace just as bad as the one that had left him fighting for his life in the hospital with bandages around his wrists and scars left for life.

And his parents had been so hopeful, he just couldn't let them down again. In fact, he refused to.

And so every thought that entered his mind went down into his journal; that black, leather bound book that he'd had for his bee a year now. The book that carried everything inside of his soul in words and drawings and torn pages from the hours where he had pressed down on the pen too hard in his desperation to get everything out before it ate him alive.

And one evening, that journal went in his rucksack and he left. He didn't really think through exactly what he was doing, he tried to tell himself he was just taking a walk to clear his head but he knew that wasn't the case. His mind was beyond being cleared.

But he told himself it was just a walk nonetheless. A walk with no jacket despite the icy weather outside, a walk without telling his parents that he was even leaving despite the fact that they were still hesitant to even leave him in his room alone. A walk.

A walk that lead him to the bridge in town that towered over the river.

His body wracked with shivers, long sleeved t-shirt too thin to offer even the slightest inclination of warmth, the light pattering of rain dampening his hair as he reached out with fingers too cold to even bend and rested them on the sharp concrete of the bridge wall. Beneath the darkening evening sky, the water below look abyssal. Like a void of blackness except for the odd reflection of a streetlamp.