Work Text:
A slice of arms, side by side, blood dripping onto the fitted sheets.
Bonding through a shared pain and escape from reality, the man and woman with no regard for the scars left on their arms, or their faces.
The skin ripped open, a metaphor turned reality, as veins gush out blood with every beat of the heart.
Rachel wasn't sure when this bloody happening became a habit, but there was no turning back now. Sometimes her arms would sting and spike for weeks. The feeling of being stabbed by a million knives like Caesar, only, it was something that she wanted.
A desire for pain by any other name.
Rachel's dark hair dripping with the deep red that also habitually splashed against her clothes, but it was just a dye to her.
Every time she felt sick seeing her own bones, she was reminded of the man whom she had fallen in love with, and all was alright in the world for just that moment.
She always wore long sleeves.
Andrew's arms were littered with raised red scars, bandaids scattered about, but barely covering anything.
He would time how long it took for the blood to appear after the incision, the moment he finally lifts the knife from the lowest layer of skin, until the red spills out beneath him.
He would see himself in the mirror and would become enthralled with the look of blood on him. He would see his beautiful wife engaging in the same habit, and by god was she even more beautiful.
The blood was just metaphorical, but the pain of everything else was able to be masked by the streaks of red.
Nobody questioned why his clothes always had blood stains.
Then, Rachel begged him to stop. She wasn't going to continue on with this, she decided.
It was either the people or her, and Andrew chose her. They would stop.
It takes a while to break a habit, a lifetime for some, but Andrew decided that it was worth the suffering.
And when Rachel died, and there was no other escape from the pain, there was only one thing left to do.
He would wait by her memorial, sparsely slice his wrist—less than before, but still plenty—and nobody would question it.
The metaphor for love that him and Rachel had engaged in was dangerous. The blood spilled on the carpets and the blankets, and neither ever bothered to clean it. The carpet beneath Rachel's memorial was redder than the surrounding areas.
Nobody questioned it.
Andrew should have questioned it, but he didn't. The only logical explanation for the weighing of his people's needs and his longing for his wife.
The sharp blade to skin, the pool of blood, his heart's bursting not as reality, but as a metaphor for his love.
Maybe the love was just a sickness.
No wonder it stung so much.