Breaking Their Hold -synacky-

One

January 9th

Brian's POV

I think it had been around eleven p.m. when I'd crawled into bed. I'd curled up under the sheets and buried my face into my pillow, begging and praying for sleep to come and swallow me whole. I hadn't slept well recently, well I never sleep brilliantly because being an insomniac sucks ass, but I hadn't been sleeping at all. Barely two hours every night. I'd been living off of coffee and energy drinks but there comes that point where no amount of caffeine can save you.

But it's one-thirty a.m. now and I'm still awake. This fucking sucks, so bad. My eyelids are drooping and my muscles are all slumped and relaxed but my mind just doesn't want to sleep like the rest of me does. I keep trying to clear my mind of all thought before I sleep but it just never works. I always end up thinking about something completely random, like "what would I do if a murderer came into my room right now", or "I haven't seen mom and dad in a while, oh god what if they think I'm avoiding them". Stupid fucking brain fucking keeping me awake.

The moon's really bright tonight. Almost full, too. My window's always open on nights like these, curtains drawn so that I can look at the moon. I sound like a right faggot but it's just really fucking beautiful. Maybe that's why I can never sleep...

Ugh, wandering thoughts again.

I turn over and lay my head on the cold side of my pillow, sighing and closing my eyes again. I start shivering because of the cold night air that's drifting in my window and giving me goosebumps, but I don't have the energy to get up and shut said window. I can hear the cars on the freeway not too far from here and this, like the moon, is quite comforting. But I can't say it's helping my current situation.

I groan and literally faceplant my pillow, knowing how all this is going to play out and sooner rather than later I'll be huddled up on the living room couch watching late night/early morning shopping channels and draining my house of all its alcohol.

With a sigh I haul myself out of bed, groaning again as my blood rushes all in different directions and makes my head spin. My entire body shards shuddering and convulsing with the cold and, realizing I'm naked, I scrabble to pick up any loose items of clothing I can find on the floor, dirty or not. I ended up in sweatpants, no shirt. Typical.

I wander into the bathroom, yawning and still shivering, and flick the light on, squinting and grimacing as the bright light nearly blinds me. Partially unable to see I stumble over to the sink, running the taps and splashing my face with warm water because I could have sworn I had goosebumps on my face. As I look up into the mirror I sigh, almost in disgust, at my reflection. I look fucking terrible.

My eyes look so sunken- and they're shrouded by dark circles, obviously. More like fucking black holes than dark circles but whatever. My cheekbones, well they've always been prominent but fuck me they look like they're gonna tear out of my fucking skin. I need to eat more. Remind me to eat more. My lips look almost blue and my face is ghostly pale, almost this gray sickly pallour that I'd only ever seen in movies, y'know when one of the charcters gets bitten by a zombie and they go all pasty-looking? That's me right now. Not to mention my hair's a mess and it's all greasy and ugh.

I turn from the mirror and sigh again, drying my face on the handtowel by the sink and then walking slowly out of the bathroom, flicking the light off as I go. I'm yawning again as I drag my feet down the stairs, shuffling along into the living room and all but catapulting myself face-first onto the couch. I wish I had some fucking sleeping pills.

Conveniently, there's already a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel's sitting on the coffee table in front of me so I pick it up and immediately start drinking. Maybe this could get me to sleep...

But it's another half an hour before I realize that the drinking's going nowhere and it doesn't look like I'll be sleeping tonight. I look at the clock in the kitchen that I can see from here and it's two-fifteen a.m.. Ugh, perfect.

It's not long after that that I'm back in my room again, hunting for a shirt and hopefully some socks and maybe if I'm lucky, some sort of jacket or hoodie so that I can go out for a while. I might have a walk around the neighborhood or go for a drive and sit at the beach or something. Anything to keep my mind off of... Everything.

Two-twenty-five a.m. and I'm sitting in the front seat of my Mustang, pulling out of my drive and driving off down my street somewhere. I'm paying attention to the road but not exactly where I'm heading. I'll find something to do. Hopefully. And I'm still too cold - I couldn't find a hoodie.

Two-forty-five-a.m. and I'm parked on the curb of some street I don't know the name of and probably haven't been down before, but I'm pretty sure I'm still in Huntington and if I'm not then I'm somewhere between there and Long Beach. Not that there's much of a distance between them seeing as they kind of melt into each other but you know what I mean.

I'm bored. I haven't gotten more tired than when I left the house, but I'm sitting around doing nothing and as much I don't want to go home and mope around being miserable, I don't want to be doing it here either.

I pull out a pack of Marlboros and a lighter from the glovebox and, as I place one of the cigarettes between my lips and go to light it, I feel time stop for a moment or two as I catch the eyes of someone walking past.

I burn my thumb on the lighter flame as I stare at him, and I curse under my breath but he looks at me for that split second that he passes me, our eyes locked for that sliver of a moment. He carries on walking but I carry on staring, my jaw dropping a little and the unlit cigarette falls into my lap. Black hair, green eyes, green green eyes glinting in the moonlight. Those fucking eyes, oh my god. I barely got a look at the rest of him because I was so encaptured by those eyes but I saw a septum piercing and snakebites and oh my sweet fucking baby jesus those fucking eyes-

I can't resist but poking my head out of my open window and whipping it around to look at him, watching him walk. He's not too far away now and I can see one of his hands at his side, occaisonally lifting to his face so I assume he's smoking. Ugh, hot. His hips were swinging side-to-side slightly with each step he took, not in a tell-tale "oh look at me I'm so fucking sexy" way, but a subtle way that was already making my pants tighten and oh what the fuck is happening to me.

In sudden desperation, and with no rational thoughts filling my brain instead of sick, twisted, dirty ones, I claw at the glovebox and rummage around for my knuckleduster, eventually finding it and sliding it onto my right fist, flexing my fingers into it and then clambering out of my car, almost banging my head because I'm barely concentrating on anything other than him.

I can see him walking still, further away now but I can still chase him down with ease. I start running, not too fast, so that it's not too obvious yet, and I start praying that he's got earphones in so that he won't hear me and then I see him turn into an alley and I start sprinting, not caring now if he sees me or hears me because if he does it'll be too late for him to do anything about it.

I slip into the alley he walked into and, almost tripping over discarded boxes of chinese takeout and smashed bottles of beer, follow him slowly so that I'm only about two feet behind him. And then I start grinning like an idiot because I can hear Helena by the Misfits blaring out of the earphones in his ears and he so obviously can't hear me. And then I pounce, my left arm curling around his stomach and pulling him too me as I knocked him out cold with one punch to the back of the head.