𝐨𝐤𝐚𝐲, 𝐛𝐚𝐦𝐛𝐢

𝟷𝟿. 𝚑𝚊𝚕𝚏 𝚏𝚘𝚛𝚐𝚒𝚟𝚎𝚗𝚎𝚜𝚜

TW: implications of self harm. talk of death.

happy holidays to those who celebrate! Please remember to comment & vote. I love you, always.

___

Jean's POV

Jean got your text.

Before he received it, part of him was so tempted to leave the Regiment Room and call it a night.

Craving to. Itching to. Dying to.

He could no longer stand sitting with the parts of him that had started to run amok, using his bones as bridges to run across and arteries as ropes to crawl upon. A stampede of his feelings running across each other, marring his being into a pulp, far past anything that could be considered human anymore.

No matter how hard he tried, breathes taken, assuring words of inner dialogue said in repetition to himself, trying to bring himself some peace of mind that he lost, he couldn't knock the maddening uneasiness sitting in him since he sat as a witness to your conversation with Historia back at the table. Where he heard a pile of words, he didn't know he would mind until he heard them, processed them, and minding them very quickly became all he could do.

What you were saying to Historia was innocent, ordinary, nothing but harmless words of nature rolling off your tongue that never keeps quiet. But even with it being something he shouldn't have even blinked twice at, tightness rose with him and twisted in the center of his chest as his mind flashed highly defined images of what it would look like to see dancing with someone else.
Close and personal.

The thought of that encounter alone made him almost physically ill, living in the uncomfortable state of being queasy and hot.

It felt like he was under the pressure of the deepest areas of the ocean where all the undiscovered creatures live in the dark, his body and heart crushing and popping beneath the weight of it all.

Jean parted ways from you, intending to get a drink but decided at the last second to go outside to get fresh air instead. The goal was to cool off and collect himself because he couldn't seem to find settlement from anything or anywhere. It was an attempt, a pathetic one, to setting the endless circuits of bombs going off inside of him.

Once he was outside, and minutes passed as he stood alone, those bombs then settled into guilt. It lit him up like lights on the bark of a tree in all the wrong ways, flammable and unsafe to the nature surrounding him.

Remorse for the way he treated you back at the table. The way he snapped at you and yanked himself away from your natural comfort as you sat as innocent and as pure as you always do. While he acted like nothing but a cold deadly plague, invading you and making things worse the way he always does.

With no thought, he made a rash choice driven by irritation and unsettling anger, and the second the sharpie fell from his hand, and he saw the way your face dropped, his stomach acid filled his throat and lungs.

He was disgusted with himself.

He had to go away before he did something else. Before he dug himself deeper into a hole he, at some point, wouldn't be able to crawl out of.

Saying and doing things without thinking never got him anywhere good. He knows that better than anyone; it's something he learned from a very young age.

And so he did. He went. But the longer he paced outside, the more that guilt settled even deeper into a pathetic pile of apologies he needed to say to you that swelled up his cheeks and tongue. No matter how pathetic those apologies might have to be, he was willing to do whatever it took.