Alone

Chapter Eighteen

Warning: talks about self harm

~.~

Kai's spiral went from alcohol to the fresh scars on his arms and wrists, he would cover the white gauze that he used after he treated the cuts, with jumpers and hoodies or even arm warmers. No-one had noticed yet, so Kai would keep going, needing something to feel better, alcohol had worked for a couple days, but soon Kai started to feel like the feeling of the cuts helped him, so slowly he moved to marking his arms and then making sure that they were taken care of, cleaning the cuts, and dressing them. 

He refused to talk about what happened that day, whenever Amara had tried pulling him aside to talk to him, he would just evade her, saying he needed to go get something from the shop. Kai told himself that pulling away was better for her, but he could hear her crying to Apollo, wanting to get everything back to the way it was before.

A container of ice cream was held in Kai's hands as he re-watched Gilmore Girls on his laptop for what seemed like the fiftieth time. 

Kai seemed fine with this, until he realised that he had to get up for his phone, across the room, he fell and again broke down. 

Kai found that after his dizziness came when he was barely a teen, he was a lot more emotional, crying over small things, it didn't get better when his dizziness stopped temporarily, he thought that he should probably go to therapy a couple of times but didn't do anything. 

His first instinct was to call Amara. She dropped everything to come comfort him, he felt bad for asking, but he needed a friend.

His voice was shaky when Amara picked up the phone, "Hello?"

"Amara... I'm so sorry, I was a major asshole... And what I did was unforgivable." Kai was talking about the amount of times he had got annoyed at Amara and Apollo for checking in with him to the point of throwing hair bobbles at them, "But I really can't do this anymore... I'm so fucking tired of this all... And I need a best friend."

The other side of the line was quiet, Kai almost took the request back, until Amara answered, a hint of happiness in her voice, "I'm coming home right now." 

Amara calmed him, then got him to talk about what happened, from the beginning. 

Kai told her most of it, not including the fresh cuts on his wrists.

Then Apollo came home from spending time with Dabria, comforting Kai, before Kai fell asleep from pure exhaustion and dizziness. 

~.~

Kai was back at work after being gone for a while, waiting for his dizziness to calm down before heading into a heavy work environment. 

He was currently listening to a woman, who was a first time customer at the café, yell at him for not wearing proper work attire after she didn't like the coffee he gave her. 

"Um ma'am, I'm sorry, but how is my work attire your problem? My boss looked at what I wore and didn't say anything." Kai asked her. 

The outfit in question, blue jeans with a black T-shirt that once, long ago, had a large mushroom on the front, a name tag was pinned to his shirt, displaying his name and pronouns, with black elbow length arm warmers and black boots, his famous mushroom earrings dangling from his ears, Kai's fresh brown hair (he had dyed it his natural colour with Amara before she went to bed the night before), was getting long now, he refused to cut it, wanting to see how long he could get it before he got bored and cut it all off.