When Hands Touch

33. silhouettes of you

WARNING: severe panic attack, dissociation, mentions of abuse.

there is a recap in the comment section of the note at the end of the chapter, please don't read if it could trigger you.

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CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

SILHOUETTES OF YOU

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"Xen, I think there's a spelling mistake in your assignment."

Glancing up from his paper, Xen looked at Milo, the exhaustion evident in his eyes. Then, he looked back down at the paper in front of him, and let out a small, "Oh. Shit."

Milo yawned, stretching his arms out as he did, nearly pulling a muscle. "How much do you have left to do?" he questioned, rubbing his eyes as he continued to work on his own assignment.

"Uh—" Xen paused, wiping his hand down with his face. Squinting his eyes, Xen shook his head, blinking rapidly. "Sorry, what?"

What did I even say? I'm so sleepy.

"How much more of your assignment do you have left?" he asked, once the alert part of his mind had caught up with his two a.m. mind, the one that was running on ice cold water, because Xen refused to drink coffee.

After ten seconds of silence, Xen spoke again, voice ten times lower, probably because of how late it was. "I have no fucking idea," he muttered, rubbing his eyes harshly. "I'll be done in a minute, I think."

But, that wasn't the case, and a minute turned into five whole minutes of Xen typing away at his keyboard, and Milo waiting for him to finish so that they could go to bed.

By the sixth minute, however, Xen just stopped typing, slowly raising his hands from the keyboard and shaking them out as he let out a slow breath.

"What's up?"

Xen shook his head. "Nothing, sorry."

Huh? "Xen, what—"

"I think I'm dissociating," Xen divulged softly, like he was telling Milo a secret. "Actually, I'm a hundred percent sure I'm dissociating. Right now."

Oh fuck. This was new. Milo had never seen Xen experience this before. So, he did what he did best— he stuttered out a reply that was probably extremely unhelpful, but hopefully better than nothing.

"Uh— shit, okay, w-what can I do?"

Shaking his head again, Xen squeezed his eyes shut for a second. "Nothing, just- it's fine. I'll just..." He muttered a small curse under his breath, and then another, louder this time. "It's fine. It's fine, I'm fine, I'll just finish the assignment and try to sleep."

When Milo was researching panic attacks for Xen, he had stumbled upon dissociation, too. He knew what it meant. But he just didn't know what to do. Though that wasn't anything new.

"Can I—" Milo paused, covering his mouth as he yawned. "Sorry. Sleepy," he mumbled, patting his cheeks with his hands to wake himself up. "Can I help? With your assignment, at least? So that you can sleep sooner?"

For a moment, Xen was quiet, eyes going over his assignment, the bright white light of the lamp making all the tiny hairs on his chin stand out. Then, he sighed and tilted his head up to the ceiling. What's happening?

"You should probably sleep," he muttered, not even making eye contact with Milo. "I— it'll take me some time to finish up this assignment, I don't think anything I've written makes sense."