Beautiful Mess [UsUk / AmeDen]

Chapter XV

Alfred spent the rest of the evening drowning in his own misery, expressing his pain through drawings that ended up being thrown everywhere over the room floor. He kept hysterically crying, shouting at the world, the universe, and himself for being too weak to properly function. He still didn't exactly understand why he was here, in the psychiatric ward, why he couldn't have stayed in the dorm with Arthur and kiss him until the pain finally went away.

Now, when he was here, everything was in an even bigger haze.

The medicine hadn't started taking effect on him yet, unfortunately, so the hallucinations just kept growing stronger because of the silence surrounding him. He felt as if the four walls of the room were narrowing more and more with each second, and there was very little oxygen in the room.

His mind was racing, he was going over each and every horrifying possibility - him getting killed, tortured, manipulated... The delusional thoughts reminded him of danger, only danger and nothing else.

Everything felt terrible.

Shadows chased him in the dark, sadistic screams shattered his skull and broke his heart, and all hope he previously had disintegrated into thin air, as well as his happiness. He was thoroughly convinced that happiness was simply an illusion, and his life didn't matter.

Soon enough, he found himself curled up in the corner of the room, shaking intensely out of fear and desperation, thinking about how nice it would feel to disappear for at least a while, until the pain stopped. Kind of like a hibernation. But that wasn't possible, and the fact that he wasn't able to end this suffering made him feel another thousand times worse. He kept sobbing into the palms of his hands, whispering to the voices to goddamn stop already, yet nothing was working. He felt so lonely, broken to pieces, lost, perplexed, and wondered how his life changed so abruptly, only in a matter of weeks.

He didn't hear when someone was opening the door, but the sudden sound of footsteps scared him because he wasn't aware who they belonged to - and the next thing he knew was that he screamed a string of unintelligible words out loud, shifting even closer to the wall, realizing that whatever could happen, he was cornered, without a way to escape.

"It's just me, Alfred." A familiar, soft voice echoed through the space around them, and he blinked a couple of times, looking towards the figure of the person approaching him. He could barely resemble who it was through the haze. "It's Emilia. I came to check on you before sleep,"

Oh, thank god.

Even though he didn't know her for a long while, and she was nothing special to him, just his psychologist, he had this gut feeling that he was able to trust her. She wouldn't hurt him, he knew that.

"Please, help me..." He mustered out through tears and she didn't even hesitate to do as he asked. Holding out her hand for him to get up easier, she encouraged him to stand instead of being curled up in his own corner. And he did as he was told, standing up and holding onto her since he could barely balance himself properly. "They are trying to hurt me." He whispered, his body trembling more than ever.

He wasn't violent, unlike some of her patients who often had the tendency to be damaging to themselves or others. He was just desperate for it to end, but would never hurt her or anyone else just because of his own pain. That was fully against his morals.

"No one is going to hurt you while I'm here, okay? I'm keeping an eye on you, so you can relax." She further encouraged him as they both sat down on the bed, the younger still shaking to the point of almost passing out if she wasn't there to keep him conscious. "I promised you I can stay the night, and it seems like that's a good idea, right?"