Broken- And Fixed Again- (A Jamilton Fanfic)

Chapter 11: Just Another Lie

//TW: attempted suicide, self-harm, self-hatred, swearing, abuse\\

Thomas

I stared up at the gray, monochromatic ceiling, surrounded as I was by the incessant beeping and the cold, unloving metal of the hospital machines. What a strange color, gray. With so much potential to be so many different things, and yet it manages to be the bleakest thing in existence, a funeral dirge of its own kind, a color for all those who had tried to be something brilliant and burning and beautiful, and failed so spectacularly that their fall wasn't even memorialized, their names forever fading into obscurity. It could have been a canvas to be painted on, to be filled with a new world and a new time, but instead, they ruined that all with the solemn, under spoken tones of a neutral gray.

I stared up at the ceiling and wished it would disappear, so I could touch the open and limitless sky. So I could fly, sweeping over forests, both of trees and of stone and marble, and leave this world behind for the one that waited me just beyond. So I could feel the wind running through my hair and drifting down my body as I soared, liberated from the tethers keeping me trapped in this bed, in this room, under a gray, boring, incomplete ceiling.

My gaze flickered down to my bare arms, exposing the slashes that marked my skin. I stared at them, wondering what would have happened if the knife had just gone a bit deeper, torn open a major blood vessel even sooner. Part of me itched to run my fingers down the cuts stitched together with an experienced grace, but I was simply too exhausted to move. A weariness settled down in my bones, a weariness that weighed like statues of fallen soldiers and lost kings.

I let out a breath, leaning my head back against the cold, metal frame of the hospital bed, though there wasn't anywhere else to go. I was just as trapped here as one of the machines, the only thing separating us being the fact that I had a beating, breathing heart.

My stomach rumbled, another note in the one-instrument band that was the heart monitor, keeping its steady rhythm diligently. God, I despised that noise. I just wish it would stop, so I could be free from having to listen to its intolerable beeping.

It was official.

I hated hospitals.

The noises that all pile together despite their remarkable quietness, the smell of disinfectant barely concealing the underlying rotting stench of death, oh, and the colors? The colors of pure neutrality, refusing to take a stance, refusing to offer me any feeling besides utter detestation? How could anything thrive here, how could anything want to fight for its last few breaths, when there was nothing but that foreboding omen hanging so thick in the air?

I would have cried, if I had any tears left in me. But the sad truth of it was that I had used them all up and dried them all out, and all I could do now was stare up at the ceiling and wish I could just leave and never ever have to come back.

There are voices in my head.

Voices that scream and remain silent.

Voices that demand a thousand different things, all contradicting each other in every way possible.

Voices that just want everything to come to a halting end until the last stars flicker out of existence once and for all, almost as much as I do.

There are voices and they will not be silenced; they will scream and scream until they have what they want, until they are satisfied with the way they have left me.