Not What We Expected

33: I'm Scared

Oh, it is Friday and here's a chapter. :o So I've stopped put up warnings when self harm appears because I figured that the person who finds it triggering in fictional forms, would already have stopped reading this story. But this chapter contains self harming causing a need for medical care. I'm neither a doctor nor a psychologist, (and this is 1992, don't know how things were then) so I will only try and do my best to try and still keep it realistic.

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After ten minutes on his bike, Ant reaches Dec's house and his fast heartbeat is a combination of the physical exercise and all the worst-case-scenario-thoughts his brain has come up with. Ant starts with knocking on the door but when nothing happens or no answer comes he tries the handle and it turns out that the door is unlocked.

He calls out Dec's name at the same time as he walks around into the house and when he hears Dec's voice informing him that he is in the bathroom, it feels like he can breathe out a little bit. But that really is for a little bit, a short moment. The door to the bathroom is ajar and he can't help his first reaction.

"Dec! Bloody hell, what have you done!?", Ant exclaims when he sees Dec sitting with his back against the wall in his pants, a (partly not any more) white t-shirt, with his fluffy blanket around his shoulders. A bloody towel is pressed against one of his arms. Also some strains of blood have ended up on the floor around him and the amount of red-coloured tissues are almost too many to be counted.

"Pun intended?", Dec asks when he looks up at him with a tired glance, but his eyes still say that he is so happy that he's not alone anymore.

Ant shakes his head to the question, even though it may have been rhetorical. It's weird to think that this is the first lines they exchange for almost two weeks... He walks towards Dec and sits down beside him, instinctively wanting to do something but without knowing what he should or could do.

"What have you done to yourself?", he asks even though it's more an answer about why he wants. He sees what Dec's done - but that question was all his brain could come up with.

"You know...", Dec says without looking at him, only trying to wipe away the blood that keeps pounding out of a long wound, maybe 3-4 inches, reaching along his small, and a bit girly, wrist. "But it doesn't stop bleeding and it starts to scare me... It never takes this long for it to stop bleeding."

"Dec, you said you had control. You even promised me you had control!", Ant exclaims but it's not until Dec almost hides his face behind his arms that he realises that he raised his voice. It's the worry that almost makes him seem angry but he tries to take a deep breath.

"But that was before I fucked up the two best things I have ever had, the relationship with- with you... And the friendship with Jojo...", Dec whispers and for a second he tries to hold together the wound to make the blood stop flooding. "Anth... it's never been like this before..."

Ant tries to remember what Sarha once said about something she had learnt from the scouts and tells Dec to hold up his arm above his head. It was something about getting the wound about the heart when you want to stop bleeding. Something about the gravity, maybe? Or maybe not at all...?

It really worries Ant that Dec seems so unsteady when he raises up from the floor to get a new towel, so he tells him to sit down and just let Ant help him. Or try to help him and solve this situation. When he offers to get the towel, Dec also asks him to get some tape he should have in the nightstand in his room. - By the way, the nightstand that he once didn't let Ant open.

A bit reluctantly, he leaves Dec alone in the bathroom and walks to Dec's room. Blood has been dropping on the floor on the way between the two rooms and some more crumpled tissue with blood is laying on both his bed and desk.