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It’s not a good day, for Bob. And, if he’s being technical about it, it’s technically not a good night. Or morning, depending on what hour you draw that distinction.
He’s restless and he can’t sleep. The ceiling of his room is a smooth but matte metal, with no scratch or even dent for his eyes to lock onto, which means his eyes end up just kind of mindlessly drifting.
So he just… lies there. He lies and he watches the lights of the New York City skyline bleed in through his window.
He doesn’t have curtains. Yelena doesn’t either, but he thinks its more out of paranoia’s sense than anything else. Bob tries to keep his room from being too dark for… obvious reasons, and it’s dark enough this high up that the lights of Midtown Manhattan don’t bother him too much. He can’t even really hear the sirens of police or the honking of a fleet of taxis.
This all means that it’s exceptionally quiet in his room. Usually, that equates to peace, but not for Bob. Not really.
He holds up his arm and locks his elbow. His hand relaxes as he watches his fingers dangle and curl in on themselves. The sleeve of his sweatshirt falls a bit, revealing scarred lines on his wrist.
It makes him want to cry, it really does.
The meth—sure, that shit’s stapled on his mind forever—but he doesn’t think about it constantly anymore. He’s proud of that. There used to be a time where all he could think of was where he was going to get his next moment of relief, because that’s what meth was. It was relief. But sometimes on his bad days, his really bad ones, his eye will twitch and he has to shake the want out of his hands. Because it isn’t want, he never wanted to be an addict, never wanted to be sick. He just… didn’t know any other options.
Bob’s not not still an addict. That’s one thing that, sometimes, people forget. Once you’re an addict, it never really goes away. When you get out of rehab—not that he’s ever been, but he did get clean during the trials—your craving doesn’t just disappear. The proper term is “recovering” addict, because addiction is a battle that never really ends.
And even though his addiction was once clear in his sunken eyes and frail frame, a stranger could look at him and never know.
But these lines? This is a part of him. It didn’t go away when he started the trials, or started his new life. They didn’t fade either, not like that craving he had when he was really sick.
These scars are a piece of him, and it hurts. He can feel his face twitch and his pupils shrink a bit as the ugly beast tries to claw its way out of his chest. He knows that feeling, all too well.
His hand drops and he looks at the ceiling again. The shadows are stretching slightly, reaching out, begging to be let free.
A voice inside of him says awful things. Awful things that his friends have told him aren’t true, but they still sting. Covering his ears doesn’t quiet the voice at all.
Bob closes his eyes and takes a deep, shaky breath. If there are tears falling down his face, he doesn’t acknowledge them.
Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night with a figure standing over him. He flinches every single time, afraid that the Void is winning once and for all. But it’s always Yelena, or John, or Ava. It’s never Alexei, not after he thought the older man was his father and couldn’t stop shaking and flinching at everything that moved for hours. Instead, when Alexei is the one who hears him, he gets Yelena. The older man hovers in the hallway outside his room as he cries until he can’t anymore.
He knows that Alexei doesn’t take it personally, but it still makes Bob feel guilty.
He doesn’t like to scream, doesn’t like waking the others up because it makes him feel like a burden. It makes him feel like a heavy weight pulling everyone down instead of the anchor that Yelena says he is.
His breathing turns shallow and his chest hurts as he tries to bury the darkness further down inside of him, but the awful voice—that he now realises is his own—persists.
He starts to cry, hard enough that he can’t ignore it anymore. He has to sit up, because he feels like if he stays lying down that he’s going to suffocate.
It hurts, and he wants relief. It would be so easy to quiet that part of him, that—that thing that he hates and fights so often. But he won’t. Because he knows that he’s not that type of sick anymore.
He’s recovering, and he’s been sober and clean for nearly two years.
He thinks about what his therapist taught him, and starts to slow his breathing. His heart is pounding and thrumming against the inside of his chest.
And then slowly, it begins to even out. The ugly inside of him settles down, and Bob opens his eyes.
The void is retracting, leaving behind the darkness he’s come to expect at night.
His hands are still trembling a bit, and he can still feel his heart beating, but now he’s just… tired.
And not tired in the sense of “I’ve cried so much I can’t stay awake anymore,” no. He’s learned the very thin and very blurry line of distinguishing emotional exhaustion from normal exhaustion.
And though he definitely feels a bit emotionally drained, he’s just normal tired.
When he closes his eyes next, it’s not out of a desperate attempt to hide or to calm himself. It’s just because he wants to sleep.
The darkness overtakes him after a while, sending him into nonsensical dreams.