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They call them lows.
He guesses it’s supposed to be polite, less clinical. It doesn’t carry the same bite as “episode”; doesn’t sound so recursive. So inevitable. It’s not a state he necessarily has to find himself in again. It’s just a rough patch. A temporary setback.
Ghost’s been in a low for so long, he doesn’t remember what it’s like to feel alive.
To have the drive to move, let alone the desire. To have any desire. He drifted through life in an apathetic haze, years passing in the space between laboured breaths. He’s still not entirely sure how he ended up here, can’t remember the days leading up when they all blurred together, indistinguishable from one to the next.
They told him he was involuntarily admitted after an anonymous welfare check, that he hadn’t been heard moving around or seen leaving his flat. They told him his indifference to his own bodily needs makes him a danger to himself and they didn’t feel it was safe to release him until he showed a vested improvement in his investment in his own life.
Ghost doesn’t want to stay. He doesn’t want to leave. He doesn’t… want.
Maybe that’s why they’re called lows.
They make you feel subhuman.
The new patient is barely enough to be a blip on his radar. The man is loud from the second he walks in, covered in layers of bruises, old and new, like they belong on his skin. It’s hardly an unfamiliar sight around these parts.
The ward is tight for space and Ghost feels nothing when the doctor absently apologises for the short notice on his new roommate. That he hopes he’ll come to see it as a blessing in disguise; a change in environment will do him good. Maybe they’ll even become friends.
John MacTavish scoffs and wrenches his arm out of the orderly’s grip. “Don’t hold your fuckin’ breath.”
Ghost barely blinks.
The staff clears out, the doctor giving MacTavish a wide berth that the man barely notices; too busy shaking out his body and roving his eyes over Ghost.
“So, we’re to be roomies, aye?” he sneers. He eyes the jaundice-yellow walls, the shuttered windows with their fake, sloped handles, the lack of life in the room beyond his own heart beating in his chest. One of his legs starts bouncing, his body following behind it. “Hell’s your damage to have ended up here?”
Silence follows and his face curls in an ugly grimace, anger coiling behind his eyes. His shoulders square, brushing his cauliflower ears. “Oi, you hear me? I’m fuckin’ talking to you,” he spits, taking a lunging step forward.
Ghost forces his dead weight to roll over, his back to MacTavish, and closes his eyes.
“You fuckin’ high and mighty cunt, answer when I’m talkin’ to you!”
The new guy doesn’t sleep for three days.
He only knows because every time he rolls over, he catches sight of him; shadowboxing, more than one jab connecting with the wall seemingly just for the fuck of it, using the bed for inclined exercises, mumbling conversations under his breath all the while like it’s physically painful for him to be still or quiet. It’s anyone’s guess if he thinks someone’s answering back.
Still, Ghost feels nothing; not annoyance at his near-constant talking, filling up the room every second of every day like he’s always been here. Not fear at his threats for his silence, the rants that Ghost must feel so superior to look down on him so much that he won’t even deign him worthy of talking to. Not concern at the blood beginning to stain the walls when air became too unsatisfying to punch, the scent of iron becoming a permanent fixture in their room along with the sting of antiseptic.
It’s almost strange to smell anything at all.
“They’re gonna hose you down soon,” MacTavish breaks his uncharacteristic silence one evening. “I heard ‘em talk about it.”
Ghost says nothing.
Silence descends again; a tactile, sticky thing clogging the air between them. It doesn’t sit right, bulging within the enclosed four walls like smoke off a wet fire, not after the weeks of inane, one-sided chatter MacTavish has inflated it with. He’s somehow become unused to it. But something must’ve had MacTavish spooked because he’s hardly said a word all day, his pacing taking on a tense air as he almost patrolled the door to their room.
“I’m not lyin’,” MacTavish bites out, as quick to offensive defensive as he always is. His joints grind loudly as he presses back into the wall, forcing his heels against the floor like they could break straight through. “They said they would have to do it again if you don’t shower.”
Ghost says nothing.
A sharp, repetitive thud starts up as he jams his elbow back into the wall. “There’s one in our room. Why don’t you use it?”
His pillowcase is so stiff, it cuts into his cheek.
“I can’t,” he finally mumbles.
The words drag against the dryness in his throat, croaked, painful just to whisper; his mouth so unused to forming them, it’s almost foreign.
It makes MacTavish still, the fractured plaster beneath his elbow just starting to redden. “Can’t? What, like a germ thing? You scared of nasties down the drain?”
If only.
“I just can’t,” he repeats. “It’s too much.”
Something about it makes MacTavish frown and look away, his teeth digging uneasily into his lip. “It’ll hurt,” he finally says. It’s the quietest he’s ever spoken, the first time he’s ever heard something approaching uncertainty touch his voice. “If they use a hose, it’ll hurt.”
Ghost musters just enough to twitch his shoulders in a shrug. “It always hurts.”
It’ll be far from the first time he’s been dragged to the decon room and told to put his hands against the wall. It used to only be a warning, a threat to kickstart something in him and give him enough energy to fall into the shower under his own steam. But as time went on, he cared less and less about the promised humiliation, cared less and less about the reek of body odour and neglect infecting his room until he couldn’t smell it at all.
The threat became his reality soon after.
MacTavish’s jaw clenches, hard enough he can almost see his teeth strain inside his head. He rocks in place, his eyes flitting out the door and back to Ghost, before he shoves off the wall, his fists clenched, and slips out the room.
Ghost stares at the empty doorway, his vision already going hazy and crossed, when MacTavish stalks right back in, stomping past his eye line and soon after, he hears the shower running. It’s been a while since someone felt so dirty just through proximity to him that they had to rush to make themselves feel clean again. He must be getting bad again.
Footsteps come rapidly behind him and Ghost jerks as MacTavish throws back the sheet and though a waft of stale body odour must follow, his face doesn’t twitch.
“What are you doing?” he pushes out.
“We’re showering,” he declares tightly and takes his arm, flinging it over his shoulder, and before Ghost can say a word, he’s leveraging him up and out of bed.
He grits his teeth against the ever-present pain lacing his body, the muscles rounding his shoulders and running down his biceps feeling like they’re tearing apart;the pressure of his own body weight constantly pushing on them leaving bone-deep bruising. His compressed ribs scream as he’s stretched out over MacTavish’s frame. Every step leaves agony in its wake, his disused body forced to move, the few metres between his bed and the bathroom lasting a lifetime. He stumbles over his feet, the cold linoleum a bite that travels up his legs, and he’s unceremoniously dumped under the running shower head, clothes and all.
The heat shocks a gasp from his chest and Ghost turns into the water like a blind man seeking light, a zealot crawling on broken glass in reach of the shadow of their god. His mouth falls slack in rapture at the heat and the pressure, the way it batters against the layered filth on his skin and sloughs it off. His clothes instantly soak through, sagging from his body like peeling fat and his hands curl against the wet floor like he can cling to the water and keep it with him through the long weeks it’ll take him to get back here.
Every time. Every time, he forgets how it feels.
“These mean anything to you?” MacTavish asks, his voice muffled under the spray, and his sodden shirt pulls away from his chest. Ghost swallows the water pooling in his mouth and manages to drag his eyes open, giving him a long, blank look. He just snorts. “Yeah, didn’t think so.”
A faint jolt runs through him as he fists the material and cleanly tears his shirt in two, curling over him to peel it off his shoulders, heedless of the water soaking his own clothes. His pants follow, thrown with a wet slap against the far wall. His legs fall open, shameless, to let the water hit more of his skin. It makes some of his scars ache but nowhere near the pain of the ice water the hose pelts him with, the chill and the force leaving him to shiver for days afterwards, the scars on his back burning like they’ve reopened.
He doesn’t know how long he sits there, his skin growing red under the heat of the water, scratching at his arms and legs, dead and dry skin pilling under his nails. His hair’s plastered to his head, falling over his eyes. He threads his fingers through it, ripping out knots, and pushes it out of his face, blinking away the droplets gathering on his eyelashes. He can’t remember the last time it was cut.
MacTavish’s hand cuts through the stream. “Here; so I don’t have to smell the dead every time you open your mouth,” he quips, shaking a loaded toothbrush under his nose. Like Ghost hasn’t said less than five consecutive words since he got here.
He drags his tongue over his chapped lower lip. “Puttin’ on more doesn’t undo not usin’ it,” he grunts, surprised it manages the journey from his mind to his tongue without shrivelling up. But he takes it, the toothpaste almost falling off before he can shove it to his back teeth, the mint stinging his eyes.
“Doesn’t hurt, either, does it?” he says, rolling his eyes, and flicks water in his face.
A scoff tumbles off his tongue and he tips his head back against the wall. He scrapes the months of built-up fuzz from his teeth, the repetitive back and forth making his jaw ache and lock. A few teeth throb, dull points of pain travelling deep into bone. Ghost ignores them and spits.
Blood follows the froth down the drain.
He grunts as MacTavish turns off the tap, the abrupt absence of heat leaving him unmoored; all too aware of the pain the water managed to hide. His back’s seizing up, unused to being upright. Electric sparks of fire shoot from his hips down his legs, his compacted nerves punishing the change in pressure. MacTavish snatches the toothbrush and tosses it in the sink in favour of a towel, spreading it out between his arms.
Ghost stares at the rough fabric, his bones weighing heavy under his skin; what little serenity the water managed to beat into him vanishing.
“C’mon; don’t need to be dry, just need to not be wet,” MacTavish grunts, not giving him a choice before he’s gripping him under the armpits and hauling him up, leaving him to slump into his chest while he scrubs at him. It’s less drying and more forcing the water from his body, the calcified fibres of the towel refusing to absorb anything and leaving scratches over his skin.
He shouldn’t be letting this happen. He shouldn’t be letting him put his hands on his body, to see him like this, to bathe him like some overgrown toddler, disgustingly dependent on a stranger just to be clean. He hasn’t felt shame in a long time, hasn’t cared enough to, but he can feel it licking his heels as MacTavish brusquely works the towel over his hair.
He leaves it over his head and tugs his arm back over his shoulder to walk him from the bathroom, the floor even colder to his bare feet. The wide open door means nothing to him, even with nothing to cover himself with. He’s used to it.
What he isn’t used to is the fresh bedding on his bed.
His yellow, sweat-stiff sheets are gone.
The depression in his bed has been shaken out, the mattress flipped, and gone are the filth-ridden sheets he’s been wrapped in for who knows how long because he couldn’t get out of bed long enough for the orderlies to change them.
MacTavish haphazardly tosses the towel over the bed, protecting the new sheets from his damp skin, and drops him on top of it all like it was nothing.
“There; one shower accomplished,” he spits but Ghost somehow feels like it isn’t aimed at him.
He spreads his hand over the crisp sheet. Presses it against the resistance in the mattress. He swallows and stares after MacTavish as he crosses back to his own bed, kicking off his wet pants and digging out a fresh change of clothes. “Fuckin’ hoses, fuck’s this place good for…”
Ghost doesn’t know when it starts to change.
When shallow amusement starts to break through the yawning emptiness at MacTavish’s colourful threats; sometimes going an entire week before repeating an insult he can barely understand, the thick gravel of anger in his voice never making him flinch like the doctors do. He even tries to rope him into it sometimes, like Ghost should feel equally slighted by the starchy clothes and invasive body checks and lack of privacy. As if that hasn’t been his normal for longer than he cares to remember.
He won’t recognise the fragile spark in his chest as anger for days when MacTavish is put in soft restraints following another assault on an orderly; won’t know why his hands clench into fists as he watches him writhe in his bed, fighting the soft cuffs and screaming until his voice is hoarse, and even then, he doesn’t stop.
He won’t recognise the ghost of injustice rearing its head as MacTavish rages that it wasn’t his fault this time, that the orderly was being cruel to Sanderson, who can’t so much as speak to defend himself. That they just have to look and they’ll find bruises painting his skin when he’s more skittish than any other patient in the ward.
But none of the doctors believe him. They don’t even listen. They never do, too quick to blame some chemical imbalance in MacTavish’s head instead of stopping to consider if something triggered his rage. If he’s right.
“Oi. Sanderson.”
Even his low voice makes the kid flinch, flailing in a tight circle to find where Ghost’s waiting at a deliberate distance. Surprise turns to confusion and he doesn’t blame him; Sanderson’s been here a little over six months and in that time, Ghost’s never given him reason to think he even knows his name, let alone want a chat.
Ghost nods him over to the corner and watches him take his ever-present notebook out in anticipation; he gives him a once-over at the same time, clocking how tight his elbows stay to his ribs like he’s holding his torso upright, the way his steps are barely a foot apart, giving him an awkwardly shuffling gait. His fingers run nervously over the pages, instinctively flicking through pre-written responses; they’re red at the tips, nails compulsively bitten down to their beds.
“You ‘ear ‘bout MacTavish?” he cuts to the chase and Sanderson’s flicking pauses. S’pose it’s not a common enough topic.
He quickly flips through the pages, taking out the stubby pencil from the binding and scribbles out, “He in iso?”
Ghost shakes his head, looking over Sanderson down the hallway. “Just softs in our room.”
He nods, the tip of the pencil winding in an absent spiral on the top corner of the page.
“‘E did quite a number on that orderly; four fingers, cracked forearm, few teeth. Think it might be a new PB,” he rattles off blankly and he offers a grimace of a smile, his grip on the notebook tightening. Bit of the squeamish type, this one. “Makes you wonder why he went so ‘ard.”
Sanderson freezes.
“‘Ad to ‘ave been a good reason,” Ghost continues, his unblinking gaze locked on the kid, and almost feels bad as he starts to sweat. Almost. “He wasn’t even on our rotation; heard he runs the third block, group therapy ‘nd shit. That’s your timeslot, innit?”
He’s almost shaking now, notebook tucked tight to his chest under his crossed arms, rocking on his feet.
“Pretty far outta his way for an itch,” he pushes. “Almost feels targeted ‘nd the quacks don’t think MacTavish is capable o’ that kinda forethought when ‘e’s in one o’ his rages. Idiots.”
Sanderson wheezes out a ghost of a laugh, nodding once, his eyes darting for an escape.
“Sanderson.”
The kid flinches, shoulders rolling forward to brace himself.
“What’d he do.”
It’s not a question.
And they both know he doesn’t mean MacTavish.
Sanderson’s teeth dig into his bottom lip, blanching the already abused skin. His eyes do a final pass around them but no one is giving them any mind; not for the man who’s little more than an afterthought and a boy with no voice of his own. His shoulders heave in a heavy sigh and he hangs his head and if Ghost were a better man, he would leave the kid alone.
He’s not.
Sanderson jerks his head and rolls them so he’s backed into the corner, his body completely hidden from view by Ghost’s. Those red fingers tremble as they reach for the hem of his baggy shirt, tugging it up just over his ribcage.
His ribcage that’s burst in bloody technicolour; sickly yellow washed out by fresh bruise purple and middling red, wrapping around his side in a way that makes it clear it continues over his back. A familiar topography of blunt force trauma that has Ghost breathing slowly out of his nose.
The shirt falls and Sanderson balls the excess in his hand, pulling it tight to his body like it’ll hide the memory as well as his skin. He slumps back into the corner like a weight has lifted from his shoulders but his legs can’t hold him up; the sudden relief just as difficult to bear.
He looks so small. So young.
Ghost huffs out a harsh breath. “That all he did?”
Sanderson swallows thickly, his trembling getting worse, and he watches through tight eyes as he fumbles with his notebook, his chicken scratch getting even worse before he finishes. He tilts the notebook inwards, like it’ll be enough to hide the words, before he spins it around almost too quick to follow.
“He called me Roach.”
Something they don’t tell you about closed environments is no matter how they present themselves, no matter how safe and accepting they claim to be, the virtues they cling to, they are hotbeds of gossip. There’s no such thing as privacy in a psych ward, bodily or otherwise. Ghost understands that better than most.
Sanderson was admitted after just surviving a swing from a tree.
And the whole ward knew about it before they finished moving him in.
He didn’t come into this place with the name Ghost.
He blinks down at him, at this kid in his too-big clothes and his wide eyes that’ve already seen too much. He’d only be nineteen if he’s a day; too fucking young to be in a place like this, a lie wrapped in pretty words and softer restraints and men with too much power.
He’s just a fucking kid.
Sanderson flinches as Ghost’s hand drops on his head. Just for his eyes to flutter shut as he slowly pets it back and forth, flattening his already greasy ginger curls; his whole body going limp under the simple touch.
“MacTavish is loud,” he mumbles and Sanderson’s eyes are wet as he blinks them back open. “But that’s all ‘e is. Don’t pay ‘im too much mind when he gets out.”
He sniffles but he sees the understanding bloom on his face as he pulls back. He scrubs over his eyes with the back of his hand, grinding all the way up his forearm to his elbow, and blinks rapidly from the harsh rubbing. He flicks through his notebook again, searching for a pre-written page.
“Thank you.”
Ghost stares at it long enough for the silver words to imprint behind his eyes. He looks back at Sanderson and the tentative smile crossing his face. “I’ll tell ‘im,” he promises.
Ghost sets himself up against the wall beside MacTavish’s bed throughout his lockdown; a lone sentry standing between him and the door, a break the orderlies have to navigate past to get to him. He forces them all to justify their presence, combative in a way he’s never been, a way that shocks them. Why are you here. What do you want. Why do you want to touch MacTavish. What are those meds for. Fuck off, Ghost will give them to him.
He doesn’t know why he does it. John doesn’t need him to protect him. He just… has to.
“Done a right number on yourself, John,” he drawls after the orderly takes off the final restraint, the downer he’d jabbed him with doing little to dull the brewing violence in his eyes.
“If these cunts learned how to fuckin’ listen, then I wouldn’t’ve had to,” he spits, raising his voice to send the middle of it down the hallway along with some other choice words, not even wobbly on his feet as he lunges for the orderly. Too used to jabs and fighting through ‘em, this one.
Ghost lazily pushes off the wall, stepping between the two before John can connect and land himself in another round of softs before he can even clean himself up. “Fuck off,” he orders over his shoulder and the orderly takes off, a hitch in his step like he’s trying not to run from John’s growling.
John never takes his eyes off him even as he rounds the doorway and disappears, like if he glares hard enough, he can melt him through the walls. “Move, Ghost.”
“Mm,” he considers. Cocks his head. “Don’t feel like it.”
“Fuckin’ move or I swear to god-”
“Sanderson’s fine,” Ghost cuts the threat off at the knees and John deflates, breaking off his staredown to search his face. He has nothing to hide, never has. Not from John. “Got ‘im moved to our rotation; seen ‘im chattin’ with Sandman and ‘is lot.”
John’s fingers twitch, tensing and releasing. “He’s alright?”
He hums. “Taken up finger knittin’ by the looks of it; not too bad at it, far as wonky finger puppets go.”
“You been watchin’ ‘im?” he pushes, a strange intensity bolstering his words; one he can’t quite read.
He nods anyway; John’ll find what he wants, or he won’t. “He’ll keep ‘til you’ve ‘ad a wash down.”
John’s eyes dart behind him and for a second, Ghost thinks he’ll ignore him and head for gen pop anyway, that seeing Sanderson with his own eyes matters more than getting clean. He can’t tell him it doesn’t, can’t stack his priorities, but…
Ghost’s missed him.
He didn’t know he knew how to do that anymore.
Even though he’s been at John’s side the whole time, he hadn’t been able to reach him. He was too angry, too righteous, blind and deaf to everything that wasn’t Sanderson’s injustice. It’s not the first time someone’s stared straight through him but… something about being intangible to John made his lungs feel sticky, like breathing through a wet cloth.
John’s hand taps in a rapid tattoo against his thigh; thumb to pinkie, thumb to pinkie, thumb to pinkie…
“Aye. Aye, he’ll keep,” he murmurs. He nods to himself and his eyes flit back to him, something in them easing as they meet his. “Need to give you a onceover anyway; don’t like leavin’ you in the lurch.”
Don’t much like bein’ left.
Ghost grunts instead, nodding him off to the bathroom. John rocks a few times, those eyes still stuck on his dull ones, before he turns and whips off his top, leaving a trail of clothes as he goes.
The only good thing about an open, exposed shower is that there’s enough room for two men of their stature but still John can never wait his turn; bodying him out of the water at a whim just to drag him back under it, his hands skittering over his body, exchanging bare skin for a cloth at random. He never looks away; even when Ghost’s eyes fall shut from the simple pleasure of moving water on his skin, his head heavy on his shoulders as he lets it fall, he can feel the weight of John’s eyes on him. He doesn’t know what he sees. He doesn’t tell him to stop.
Ghost cleans up the abrasions on his wrists and ankles as best he can with just water and a rough cloth. John’s forgotten about them; he usually does. Once the bright spark of pain dies off into a regular ache, it tends to fall into the background until he gets reminded of it, either by the bruises on his skin or the blood on his clothes.
Seeing them reignites his anger, that odd intensity falling by the wayside in favour of the much more familiar rage, and a rant quickly begins filling up the space, bouncing out the doorless room and echoing down the hall. Ghost weathers it all with the same apathy that he weathers his mind and John never turns those threats or his fists on him, no matter how much his less than gentle hands must hurt his aching skin; the bruises and the bloody tears from his violent thrashing that no restraint could prevent, no matter how soft.
If he can even feel the pain anymore.
Ghost doesn’t hear the doctors’ talk. He doesn’t hear their questions of codependency, if the way he and John cling to each other has started to border on unhealthy. He doesn’t leave their room unless it’s with John, doesn’t see the point when the only person he can stand talking to is him. They eat together, bathe together, force their way through group therapy together.
He doesn’t know their concern over the way John’s anger explodes when Ghost’s taken back for his mandatory individual therapy; how he becomes quicker to violence without him there to balance him out, how no one else can reach him through the chaos descending in his mind, just for Ghost to walk back in the room and it’s like a switch flips.
That concern grows when Ghost’s depression somehow manages to deepen when John falls into another manic episode and he’s deemed too unsafe to restrain in their room. He gets taken to an isolated soft room and it’s like all the life is taken with him; Ghost’s food goes untouched in its tray, the impression in his bed growing more defined as he refuses to move- can’t move.
He has nothing to move for.
There’s nothing to break through the fog of apathy; no raging, illegible Scots, no impassioned rants about explosive compounds and engineering he equally couldn’t understand. The scent of blood starts to fade, the red stains he thought permanently adhered to the walls cleaned now that the orderlies finally have a chance to come in without John chasing them out for daring to remove the proof that he exists.
The proof Ghost has also come to crave.
The doctors see the dangers a mile away. But they also see the emotion John’s mere presence somehow conjures in Ghost, a man so empty he refuses himself the dignity of a name. They see the way a single look from him can have John redirecting, no less angry, but his fists land on furniture instead of flesh.
They’re too protective, too reliant, but they don’t think they can risk separating them without losing them both.
They put him on a new med. A trial, they say, since Ghost’s so unresponsive to medication. It’s experimental, has seen good results overseas, but never been prescribed for Treatment Resistant Depression in the UK. It could be a game-changer. Maybe they just needed to think outside the box.
Ghost loses an entire week.
Time passes in a miasma, the sun rising and falling in the space between reaper’s blinks, the water-stained ceiling of their room never looking the same way twice. There’s no room for fear in this pre-death; nothing can break through the vacuum sucking out the vestiges of his consciousness. Nothing can reach him. Otherwise, he would be screaming. Begging to be released from this eternal oblivion that never ends, just as it never starts.
The only constant, the only thing he manages to hold onto in this untethered void, is a pair of eyes so impossibly blue it aches.
Ghost’s eyelids fall like stage curtains, heavy and segregating, terrifying every time in their refusal of the pull to right themselves again, but they have to, otherwise he’ll lose them. The grief is distant yet all-consuming, gnawing at his bones until they’re dust every time they fall and he has to bear the emptiness alone, until they finally rise once more and they’re reunited. He never would’ve found his way through without them, never could’ve clawed his way through the dark, nails torn from their beds as he fights to reach…
“…fuckin’ tossers, the lot of ‘em. Oughta hunt down their grans so they can beat their arses for me, poor things stuck with ungrateful cunts that don’t even know knit from crochet. Probably never worn a single sock let alone a fuckin’ jumper. Imagine that, slavin’ away over a jumper, hoodie an’ all, and they don’t even have the grace to say they’ll wear it ‘til the day they die. Fuckin’ pricks can’t even lie to save an old woman’s heart. I’m tellin’ you, love, Sanderson’s the only one worth anythin’ in this place outside y-”
“…Johnny…”
Pages abruptly tossed interrupt the stream and for a second, Ghost fears losing his tenuous grip on reality; that without that voice, he’ll go sinking back between endless waves. He doesn’t want to go back to that place, he can’t, please-
Eyes. Those eyes. Blue stretching for an eternity. Blue bright enough to burn away the cold void, blue like copper fed to a fire, like lead and sulphur and zinc, all of them dancing in the flame Johnny sparked all because he wanted to show him how metals can colour fire. As if any flame could be brighter than the look in his eyes when he saw those first precious sparks.
“Ghost?” Johnny breathes, and life itself flows on his tongue. Warmth bleeds through his cheek, an addicting drag across his cheekbone. “Ghost, you back with me?”
“Johnny…” he repeats. It’s all he can manage, the weight of his tongue too much to conquer, his brain held together with cotton and brambles.
“Thank fuckin’ Christ,” he bursts out, those eyes momentarily falling shut as he leans down to press his forehead to his own. “These sorry bastards, I told ‘em what this shite was doin’ to you; told ‘em it wasn’t right. They said they had to give it a fair crack. A fair crack, right, I’ll give ‘em a right fair fuckin’ crack, leavin’ you like this…”
Ghost breathes in Johnny’s fire, his threats and his grudges, and lets them clear the dust from his lungs; lets it burn out the cobwebs and the refuse and takes the ache of them inflating again after going so long flatlined.
Unseen, abandoned on the bedside, lies Johnny’s journal, the page he’s been working on half creased in his blind rush.
A statue lay on the ground, toppled after centuries of guarding the entrance to a once great city. Roots grow through the fissures in the granite, anchoring the monolithic being to the earth, too deeply set to break free even as he reaches for the sun. Those same roots encircle the statue’s throat; the same force refusing to let it move punishing its inability to escape. Still, deep gouges tear up the ground leading from its fist to the great broadsword lying just out of reach. Still, its mouth is splayed open, a cavernous roar heard even in this frozen moment as it rallies.
Still, despite the futility, it fights.
Later, Johnny will tell him he refused to leave Ghost’s side, that he didn’t let anyone near him in his vulnerable state. He’ll tell him the violence it took to enforce it, the blood under his nails and the crack of bones still ringing in his ears. That he made what he did to the orderly who hurt Sanderson look like a fuckin’ handshake compared to what he did to the orderly who tried to take him away from him before the staff finally decided it was best to leave them be; that they feared Ghost getting caught in the crossfire. His eyes will harden when he recalls that; his voice will lower to a gravel as he spits out that he isn’t a fucking animal, that he can control himself. That he’d never put his hands on Ghost.
That steel will melt away when he laughs, something unsteady and derisive, and tells him his fingers found a permanent place on his pulse; that he was scared to stop feeling it in case it disappeared in his absence. Stupid, he’ll say; he knew he wasn’t dying.
“But you didn’t blink much,” he’ll also whisper into the dark, his fingers circling his wrist. They’ll be curled together, lights out long since passed, sharing the same pillow, tucked under the same blanket. Ghost won’t know where his body ends and Johnny’s begins, won’t know how he ever convinced himself he knew warmth before he was there to breathe it into his skin. “You weren’t seein’ but you weren’t sleepin’ either. You were just… gone.
“Don’t do that again,” Johnny will order. Will beg. “Don’t leave me again.”
And Ghost will look at the fingers clinging to his pulse, to the life that has latched onto his walking corpse beyond all reason, a life he doesn’t deserve, a life he craves, and will swear, “I won’t, Johnny.”