Broken- And Fixed Again- (A Jamilton Fanfic)

Chapter 2: We All Must Fall

//TW: emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, thoughts of self-harm and suicide, body hatred, swearing\\

Watch this video and smile. Then prepare yourself for this chapter.

Thomas

I'm okay.

If okay means watching the world crumble around you, knowing that there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop it. If okay means feeling the frost of an endlessly bleak morning sink its dagger-like claws into your skin and slowly tear you open, piece by piece. If okay means waking up, the world awash with the fiery hues of a beautiful sunrise, feeling the comfortable embrace of arms around you, and thinking, for just a split-second, just a wonderfully blissful moment, that it was all just some nightmare crafted by the part of your subconscious that you don't want to acknowledge, and that the real world could never truly be so cruel, only to have reality come crashing down on you once again.

If okay means being the subject of a world of pain, then I've never been more okay in my entire life.

I had known what it was to fly. I had been emboldened by the freedom of the wind surrounding me, the exhilarating rush of what it meant to be embraced by an open, limitless sky. For one brief, glorious moment, I had been a bird. A bird brushing against the clouds while humming its elegiac tune, mourning for the horrors it had witnessed in its short lifespan and yet still hopeful for the potential of every new dawn, every new dusk. I had been a bird soaring for the sake of doing so, for leaving that tiny, meaningless world down below and chasing the dreams and the fantasies that could only belong to the world above.

But that's the thing about flight, about that seemingly immortal liberty. It's temporary, almost as fleeting as love itself. A whim we can never hope to understand before it inevitably becomes our undoing.

For in the end, we all must fall.

I sat up, worming my way out of the stone cold arms that held me still. It was not an embrace as much as it was a trap designed to hold and keep me there, keep me as his. My skin burned where his fingernails had broken the surface during the long night before. His grip left me cold, left me empty, so I hugged myself instead to feel just a flicker of the warmth I had turned away from. It would never be the same, I would never know what it felt like to bask in the sunlight again, but at least I could try to replicate its feelings for myself.

I didn't sleep last night, too caught in the endless cycle of wishing I was dead, then hating myself for what that would do to Alexander, then reminding myself that I had already hurt Alexander enough, then wishing I was dead once more. If I had allowed myself to doze off, I would have been too caught up in the flashes of images of knives and blood, of the stars beaming down on me as I gazed up at them one last time before falling into an eternal sleep. Of letting go of a world that had once and for all turned its back of me.

Of losing my Alexander for the very last time.

But I suppose I can no longer call him mine, can I?

My body ached all over, the same kind of dull throbbing I had hoped I would never feel again. But here I was, the pain only serving to remind me of the night before and the awful, terrible things I had let happen simply because I wasn't strong enough to prevent them. I glanced down, taking in the sight of my bare body once again riddled with bruises and cuts, and a chorus of tiny shivers worked their way through me. Disgusted by the sight presented to me, disgusted by my own inability to defend myself from the monsters that fed on every inch of self-doubt and hatred I had for myself, I turned my eyes away from my horrible body and to the sky outside.