Chapter Text
By the time he’s out of his coma, the coma’s all there ever was, and the only feeling it’s left him with is take me back, take me back, take me back. Get me out of here. Get me out of this. It’s all too heavy and sharp and bright.
Terror begins to rise as he becomes embodied. Suddenly it’s: Get me out of my head. Don’t leave me here, this can’t be it, I can’t be in here! Something’s wrong with it, something’s really wrong with it. Everything’s already happened and there isn’t even any begging for mercy I can do.
It’s when his memory returns that the phrase ‘car crash’ starts to form. With it, pictures from just a few years ago, of drunk drivers, pictures of ex-drunk drivers that the cops had handed out in high school to scare them straight. He’d flashed them at the girls to make them squirm and squeal and then he'd bragged about how it was well disgusting, but nothing he couldn’t handle, ‘cause the movies he watched were way realistic - even the one with the tree, yeah - but they’ve stuck in his mind, still.
Does he look like that now? Is he going to end up on one of those pictures?
Everything’s wet. Everything’s so wet and squishy in his mouth. He’s face-down on the asphalt and there’s a sticky pulling sensation when he lifts his head and his brain must be leaking out of his skull, that’s the kind of thing you don’t notice until you’re holding it in. His next breath is a shivering gasp that hurts so bad that he wants to cry with the thought of having to breathe for the rest of his life. His hands start to move, shake, grasp, and he pushes up on his elbow.
There is, at least, a body. Nothing’s missing.
Except for the face. Can’t look at your own face.
Can hardly look at anything. It’s all covered in a dark film.
When he makes it to his feet, it smells like blood and rain. He is so scared and so alone and nobody can help him. He’s going to fall over again before long.
“Look at you.”
A voice! He stretches his arms out towards it, takes a few stumbling steps, on the verge of losing his balance until he hits something, curls his fingers into someone’s shirt. More rain. Thunder. He opens his mouth and some awful drawn-out moan comes out, something he has to seriously strain to shape a sound around, aah, aah, eeeh, ihhhh, eet…
“Issss it bad?”
Sirens, in the distance. Please say something, please.
“It’s pretty good,” the voice says, hoarse.
“This is wicked.”
“Yeah, it’s, uh. Pretty cool.”
Murdoc’s shining a penlight straight into his blood-filled eyeball, pulling his eyelid down. “You don’t sound like you mean that, mate.”
He tries to blink the spots out of his already-impaired vision, watches them pulsate, white on black and black on white. “No, I get it. It’s, like, metal, yeah?”
Murdoc laughs his rumbly laugh. It sounds kind of stupid and kind of funny and kind of cool. Like how his house is a mess and smells weird, but he’s got all these records and all these stolen instruments and all these kitschy satanic knick-knacks. “Wouldn’t go that far, really. I reckon you’ve got more of a teenage girl demographic.”
Stuart frowns. “Aren’t girls meant to be squeamish about that stuff?”
He makes an uhm-uhn-uhn sort of noise in his throat. “Girls love pretty boys. Love to see ‘em get hurt. Makes ‘em prettier.” His fingernail tap-tap-taps the bandage. “You change this yet?”
He almost swats his hand away. “My mum does it.”
Murdoc’s face screws up as his voice rises in disbelief. “Your mum? Your mummy’s taking care of you?”
His whole body flushes with embarrassment. “My mum’s an actual nurse, is the thing, she just knows what she’s doing-”
“Yeah. She showed me how to change your diapers while you were out. Could’ve figured that one out for myself, to be honest.”
That absolutely chokes him with shame. It’s enough to keep the fear in his throat when Murdoc pulls at the bandage, each of the adhesives across his cheek coming off.
He gawks openly, hiding a grim sort of grin behind one hand. “Come along, diaper boy,” he says, and pulls him out of his bedroom, which is well covered in posters and noticeably void of mirrors, into the bathroom.
There, he comes face to face with himself as seen through countless splatters of what is hopefully toothpaste. It’s a miracle his cheekbone didn’t shatter, but it did bruise blue-purple and swell something awful. The part of his face that got dragged across the asphalt is oozing, cratered with white-gray gunk between raw-red streaks. Nobody’s told him how much his road rash looks like zombie make-up, but everybody must be thinking it.
He feels a little more human when he’s bandaged up. It’s just the reminder that somebody cared enough to try and fix it. Somebody thinks it’s fixable.
Unlike his eyes.
“I shouldn’t laugh,” Murdoc says, holding a cotton pad under the sink. “We don’t want you to scar. We really don’t.”
He narrows his eyes. “I thought you said-”
“Scars are a whole different thing. Not your type at all, really. Don’t think anyone’ll even look at you if you end up scarring.”
He pushes him to sit on the edge of the bathtub, which is so caked in grime you can see where his arms have tended to rest over the years, and then he, without any further warning or fanfare, drags the wet cotton across his cheek.
Stuart seizes up at the sensation. He’s on some pretty decent painkillers, but it feels raw, like hitting the asphalt all over again, the sting of the swipe and then, on a delay, the rush of heat, the abrasion. Murdoc comes away with some absolutely disgusting snot-like substance and, without missing a beat, turns it over and goes in again, and this time Stuart twitches away, almost tumbles backwards, but gets caught and pulled up by the collar. Murdoc rubs it across his cheek in a way that runs down all his nerve endings into his teeth and the gummy gap where his teeth used to be, and when he gasps for air it whistles through them like ice.
The second Murdoc lets go, Stuart does fall over. Just flails and folds up in the bathtub, girlish yell and all, arms and legs angled upwards, neck bent. Murdoc laughs as he opens the cabinet and rifles through it.
“What you want, really, is anything that makes you look like a brrroken baby bird. Blood, bruises, bandages. Broken bones. That sort of thing.”
Stuart blinks at the black mold on the ceiling.
“Stitches and scars, not so much. Those might make you look tough.”
His head is buzzing. He tries to pull himself back up, but his hands are shaking and his teeth are chattering. Murdoc has to grab him by the arm.
“We both know you can’t pull off tough, yeah?”
“I can,” he whines, instantly, and then he kind of wants to cry, because Murdoc’s in his thirties and he’s got his own place and a criminal record and he’s been in bands before and he wants him to be in his band and he’s whining.
Murdoc doesn’t say the obvious thing, though. All he says is: “Yeah?” He’s got another pad of cotton, drenched in dark red disinfectant, this time, brandished like a knife he’s about to shank him with.
“Yeah,” he says, and swallows.
Murdoc pushes it in there and it seeps into the torn-up tissue and it burns like hell right down to the bone. Murdoc’s other hand is on the back of his neck to keep him still and his nails dig into his skin in sharp points of contrast, almost a relief by comparison.
“Feeling tough?” he says, sweetly.
“Yeah,” he forces out, and Murdoc pushes in harder for no reason, no medical reason at all, and he can’t stop himself from growling at a way-too-high pitch, can’t stop his legs from kicking, neither of them can, but Murdoc kicks him right back, right in the shin, thank fuck, a distraction, a dull ache.
“Behave yourself,” he warns.
It barely reaches what’s left of his brain, but it reaches his body, tells it to tense up until he’s squeezing his eyes closed and curling his toes, breathing hard and fast and needing more air, unable to relax into the pain to breathe any deeper, getting more and more light-headed until it feels like he’s going somewhere, like he has to keep going, keep going, please keep going-
When Murdoc moves away, he follows him face-first and hasn’t regained control of his legs and ends up sinking to the floor on all fours. He’s also got the most inopportune hard-on of his entire life. Possibly also the most insistent.
Murdoc tosses an antiseptic bandage the size of the palm of his hand to him, and he tries to distract himself by unwrapping it, applying it, but it’s a struggle, he’s dizzy and shaky and it’s a struggle and he’s just watching him, he’s leaning against the wall and lighting himself a cigarette.
It takes, what, three minutes? It doesn’t really feel like the bandage is covering anything up, that time. It doesn’t really make him feel any better at all. It radiates, sore, into his jaw and his ear and his eyes.
“You’ll be here tomorrow, yeah? Not like you’ve got a workplace to get to anymore.”
Stuart nervously crinkles the wrapper between his fingers, eyes on the floor, bent over to hide as much of himself as possible. “Like wh- Like when?”
“Soon as you can. But not so soon that you wake me. There’ll be hell to pay if you wake me.” He exhales a cloud of smoke. “Or if you’re late.”
“Oh. Okay.”
It doesn’t really feel like he can move. He’s not really sure what it feels like.
“We’re gonna be the next big thing, y’know,” he suddenly says. “We’re gonna rule the day.”
Some of the tension dissolves. Murdoc leaves, and he can breathe deeply, roll his shoulders, pull himself to his feet again- and again and again-
Stuart slowly lets the door click into the lock behind him, but even over the sound of soup hissing in a pressure cooker, it isn’t quiet enough for him to make it all the way to his room. His mother comes around the corner and he has to bend down for her to put a hand on his forehead as if checking his temperature, pushing back his hair.
“How’re you doing, honey? How’s your head?”
Three kilometers wide and tall to fit more static in it. “Alright.”
“What’ve you been up to?”
He shrugs. “Hanging out.”
She looks at him, but he doesn’t look at her.
“Tired, though.”
“I’ll bring you up some-”
“Not hungry. Thanks.”
He can feel her disapproving gaze on his back as he turns to make it up the stairs. “You never are,” she calls after him. “All skin and bones. You need to recover-”
There’s no real relief when he locks himself inside. He thinks: I should maybe cry, or throw up, or jerk off, or do all three of those in really any order. He doesn’t, though. He sits down at his keyboard and starts improvising, really aimlessly, really simple stuff, some chords and a melody, for one hour, and then two, and then three. And then his mum’s pounding on the door to tell him to quiet the hell down before her shift. And when he opens the door, she forces hot chicken soup upon him. And then he does feel a little better.
He tries setting his alarm clock for 11AM.