Mirror Ball

No one but me can save myself

"Mr.Leto, are you listening to me?"

Shannon stared out of the window, the late afternoon sun nearly blinding him as he tried to focus on the boats in the river below. The overwhelming acerbic smell of hospital disinfectant seeped past the nasal canula and permeated his nostrils, filling his abused lungs with noxious fumes with each measured breath he took. His mouth grew dry; a cold sweat had erupted on his palms. There was a ringing in his ears that filled the small space, drowning out the man in the white coat who was trying to get his attention, drowning out the sounds of monitors and ringing phones and bustling nurses. A peculiar sort of vertigo overtook him, as if instead of a physical height, the distance was more metaphorical, an emotional disconnect from reality that left his heart pounding and his head swirling. He turned back from the window, blinking at the doctor still talking and gesturing at him, feeling as if he were observing the entire situation from a different room, until a voice brought him, back, the voice that had always grounded him.

"Shannon,"Jared said, gently placing his hand on his brother's arm. Shannon'sgaze shifted, resting on the familiar curve of Jared's fingers as they wrapped around his bicep. His palm was warm, and the heat from it spread through Shannon, bringing him back to the moment, this ugly moment, the last place he wanted to be. At least he wasn't alone in it.

"Mr.Leto, you have two choices here." The doctor was continuing his speech, and now that the ringing in Shannon's ears had quieted he could once again hear his unwelcome admonitions. "You'll be with us for another week or so. After that, if you follow my instructions, take your medications, follow up with your doctors, stay clean and take care of your health, you can live for another thirty, forty years. Or you can walk through those doors, keep doing what you've been doing, and you'll be back here in another four weeks, tops. Only this time, you'll be in our morgue."

Shannon searched the doctor's face, looking for any sign of hyperbole, but the grim set to the man's features left no room for doubt. The warning was an earnest one, and Shannon had to admit, he had been tumbling headfirst into this moment for thirty years now. Half-hearted attempts at cleaning himself up had been followed by much more sincere, even zealous and panicked ones, but nothing had ever touched that thing inside him that always brought him right back to one self-destructive path or another. He did indeed have a choice to make now, maybe the last choice he would ever make. Had he been half-heartedly trying to live, or had been half-assed trying to kill himself? Whatever he picked now, it wasn't going to be any half-measure. This had to be it. This had to be the end of the line, one way or another.

He looked down at his arm again, the right one, the one with the IV currently attached to it. The freckles there stood in stark relief on his pale skin, which showed its age much more than he had ever noticed before. It might have been the dehydration, but it looked thinner and fragile, and not just the skin but his whole arm. The bed he was in felt enormous, the floor a hundred feet away, his legs shaky and incapable of carrying him out of this place and back into that blinding, but for the moment, unobtainable sunlight. He contemplated trying to reach it, tearing the needle from his arm, willing his legs to carry him, getting out of this hospital and running as far and as fast into that sun as he could, until his lungs burned and his legs gave out, and this all seemed like a distant dream. It was all a matter of choices after all, his to make, the story was still his. No fate, no bad luck, no bullshit that he sold himself, just choices.

Jared squeezed his other arm, and Shannon turned his head, the metaphor not lost on him. He had been angry when he first woke up, when he thought the hospital had called Jared to come collect him after overindulging. It was the usual scenario, one that had played out in one form or another a dozen times. How could he be blamed for drawing that conclusion, addled as he was from the non-illicit medications that had kept him sedated while he healed? It wasn't until he was more lucid that he understood that he lost sixteen days from his life, days that he had been feverish and delirious and at some point had crawled into his closet and pulled down clothes to make himself a bed. Days he had laid unconscious in the ICU while his mother cried and people filtered in and out, squeezing his hand and talking about him in the past tense. He hadn't known the cough he'd had for days had been leading up to double pneumonia, and he was in septic shock when Jared stopped by to find out why he hadn't shown up for a planned dinner and why he hadn't been answering calls or texts. It had only been a day since he had woken up to find his younger brother hovering over his bedside, eyes red-rimmed and swollen, cursing him out while he hugged him. I thought we fucking lost you. You can't do that to me. You can't fucking leave me, Shan. I'm not ready for that.

He never wanted to hurt Jared. It was the thing that had driven him into rehab more than a few times. But maybe that was it. They always said you had to do it for yourself. You had to want it on your own, not for other people. Did he want it? Did he really want a different life, to be a different person? He'd been an addict since he was 16. Was there even anyone else in there? Would he like him?

He looked at Jared again, and even if no one else in the room could hear the pleas in his eyes, Shannon could. He'd heard them all before, of course. Perhaps that's why he didn't need them to be spoken again, but they touched something else in him this time, something long forgotten, a small, quiet, desperate voice at the bottom of a tremendously deep well. Live. Fucking live you idiot.

"Tellme what I have to do."